Caching Of Published InfoPath Forms When Opened In FIller

I was helping a colleague troubleshoot an issue today involving problems opening an InfoPath XML document created in the browser when it is downloaded locally to be opened in InfoPath Filler.

The reason why this is necessary is to be able to use the “Save a Snapshot” feature to produce a well-formatted PDF, as the server environment lacks any facility for generating these documents.

In addition to problems that appear to be caused by Windows users and SharePoint users with different SharePoint permissions, there were some unusual errors related to an out-of-date schema when the file was rendered in InfoPath Filler. This pointed to some sort of problem related to local caching of the schema, as well as a failure to successfully retrieve the latest schema when necessary.

After doing a little digging, we found the location where downloaded form templates are cached and unpacked by InfoPath Filler. It is:

C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\InfoPath\FormCache3\<8 random chars>.<3 random chars>

Downloaded and unpacked form templates, randomly named

Here’s what my Form Cache looks like, note the randomly generated folder name under FormCache3 (BE0A9E87.5CE), and then under that, one sub-folder for each downloaded form template. If you open a sub-folder, it will contain the your unpacked .XSN file, just as if you did an Export from InfoPath Designer.

This is a challenging troubleshooting exercise, as we are dealing with users eight time zones away with poor Internet connectivity, but hopefully by clearing out this cache and ensuring that the Windows user has sufficient SharePoint permissions to open the form locally, the problem can be resolved. It’s a classic case of “Well, it used to work, why doesn’t it now?”.