InfoPath Forms – Minimize and Maximize Sections or Collapsible Sections

Recently, I have been working on a project, in which we used InfoPath extensively for designing various forms. Many of the forms has repeated information which we categorized as Header, Footer, Tracking Details etc. InfoPath template parts helped in this aspect.

Having solved that, the form still looks a little bit huge with many fields most of which are pre-populated and the user doesn’t have to worry about them. So, I thought having them collapsed initially by default and provide the user a way to maximize and minimize(collapse) the various sections would solve this issue. Something like below. See the screenshots.

At first thought, we go about searching for those tiny buttons to use for the maximize and minimize, instead there is a tricky way to do this which Microsoft uses in many windows applications. Just drop 2 buttons and put the label as 3 and 6. Now, selecting the buttons, change the font to “Marlett”, boom!, you will see the buttons changed to nice tiny triangular buttons. To make it even better, right click the button, select border/shading and select None for outline. This will merge the buttons with the background. See the below screen shots:

1. Just put those 2 button in a single row table and place the table above the section, you want to minimize/maximize.
2. Add a boolean field to the datasource lets say, sectionToggler. Set default to false.
3. Open the conditional formatting settings for the section: add rules to hide it if sectionToggler = false and show it(not hide) when sectionToggler = true.
4. Add rules on the buttons: to set the sectionToggler value to true or false depending on the button.
5. Open up the conditional formatting settings for both the buttons and add rules to hide it based on teh sectionToggler.

More links:

• 
• http://blogs.msdn.com/infopath/archive/2004/06/01/145557.aspx
• http://blogs.msdn.com/infopath/archive/2005/02/23/378968.aspx
• http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/infopath/HA010833481033.aspx
• http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/infopath/CH010421861033.aspx

ASP .Net tab missing or SharePoint site leading to Page not found and IIS 32/64-bit modes

Problems:

• ASP .Net Tab Missing in the IIS Managers Website properties
• SharePoint site shows “Page cannot be found error”.
• SharePoint sites shows “You are not authorized to view this page”, “HTTP Error 403 – Forbidden: Access is denied.”
• Either of the above problems in a server farm.

Possible Solutions:

There could be couple of reasons for the ASP .Net tab missing in the IIS manager. And this issue in turn could be the reason for the SharePoint site throwing the Page cannot be found or You are not authorized to view this page errors. Reasons that could be are:

1. Improper installation of IIS and ASP .Net framework.
2. IIS running in 32-bit mode on a 64-bit windows 2003 server.
3. Having multiple versions of ASP .Net framework lying around on the machine which needs registry cleanup.

If your server is a 64 bit machine, then make sure your IIS is not running in 32-bit mode. For this run,

cscript %SYSTEMDRIVE%\inetpub\adminscripts\adsutil.vbs GET W3SVC/AppPools/Enable32bitAppOnWin64

The output tells if enable32bitapponwin64 is true or false. If its true then, go ahead and run the following to disable 32 bit mode and enable 64 bit mode:

cscript %SYSTEMDRIVE%\inetpub\adminscripts\adsutil.vbs SET W3SVC/AppPools/Enable32bitAppOnWin64 1

If your server is a 32 – bit machine, and your ASP .Net tab is missing then, you might follow the below steps I found in this msdn blog post and KB Article from MicroSoft:

• Manually run the install for ASP.NET: ASPNET_regiis -i
• Register the dll for the MMC: regsvr32.exe “C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\mmcaspext.dll” “rundll32.exe” “C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\webengine.dll”,RegisterAspNetMMC
• From a command prompt run: C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\regasm.exe C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\AspNetMmcExt.dll /tlb:AspNetMMCExt.tlb
• Change the About value in “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\MMC\SnapIns\{fedb2179-2335-48f1-aa28-5cda35a2 b36d}” from {7D23CCC6-A390-406F-AB67-2F8B7558F6F7} to {7D23CCC6-A390-406F-AB67-2F8B7558F6F6}

If you want to have just the .net framework 2.0 on the machine go cleanup the earlier versions of it in the registry. Run regedit.exe and remove all the versions other than 2.0 below these registry entries:

• HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{7D23CCC6-A390-406E-AB67-2F8B7558F6F6}\InprocServer­32
• HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{FD5CD8B1-6FE0-44F3-BBFB-65E3655B096E}\InprocServer32
• HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{FEDB2179-2335-48F0-AA28-5CDA35A2B36D}\InprocServer­32

Try to unregister the .net framework and re-register it. Depending on your machine if 32/64-bit and the asp .net version (1.1 or 2.0?):

%SYSTEMROOT%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\aspnet_regiis.exe -u //for uninstallation

%SYSTEMROOT%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\aspnet_regiis.exe -i //for installation

%SYSTEMROOT%\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v2.0.50727\aspnet_regiis.exe -u //for uninstallation

%SYSTEMROOT%\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v2.0.50727\aspnet_regiis.exe -i //for installation

If doing all the above doesn’t bring back the ASP .Net tab then reboot the machine.

Doing all this should at least get rid of the ‘Page cannot be found‘ error but may lead  to the authorization error.

For the 403 or the authorization error, if you get this error when you access the site using the url like http://portalsite:<port&gt; then try access the site as http://portalsite:<port>/default.aspx. If the later is successful then try to create a new application pool and map it to the corresponding website. Otherwise delete the web application and recreate it from scratch and it should work. This blog post something similar.

To learn more about how to maintain multiple versions of .net framework on the same machine and serve various web applications , read the article from MSDN which talks specifics about the same.