Lost Submitted Forms on SP

So, you submitted your form from the Formotus app. Success! It is not in your outbox or draft folders. You go back to the office to check the SharePoint server, but it is gone!

So, you submitted your form from the Formotus app. Success! It is not in your outbox or draft folders. You go back to the office to check the SharePoint server, but it is gone!

First question to ask yourself, “Is my document naming convention creating a unique ID?” If it is not…

How to find it?

• Go to your SharePoint library and sort the modification column by descending to find your submitted document.
• Click on the ellipsis, it will open a window
• Click on the second set of ellipsis
• Scroll down and click on Versioning (Versioning has to be in order to be able to recover documents this way)
• If you only have one version, this is a unique document. If you have 2 or more versions, open each version and compare them to each other. (It may take looking at 2 or 3 documents to find the one you are looking for)
• Restore the original document and resave the second document with a unique name
• Change the naming convention of the form template to create a unique ID on Submit to prevent the issue in the future

Second question, ” Do I have the form submit pointing to the correct library?”

If this is a newly created form, it could be possible that you have it pointing to the wrong SharePoint library.

• Go to the data connection tab in your form template
• Click on Data Connections
• Modify the Submit to SharePoint data connection
• Copy the URL from the data connection to Notepad
• Go to the SharePoint library that is receiving the document
• Click on Library to open the Library ribbon
• Click on Library settings
• Check the navigation link beside Web Address against the one from the data connection in your form template.
• Make modifications to the data connections as necessary
• Resave, Publish to SP and Publish to Formotus

Best Business practices

• Always have a unique ID for all submitted forms. Eg. ” now() ” in the file name
• Never allow overwrite in the SharePoint library
• When creating a Submit button, use the Web Address found under Library settings in the SharePoint library

Have a great Day

Forms on Fire