Convert Your InfoPath Forms to StratusForms

September 11, 2019 Mark Rackley Uncategorized 2

Recently I wrote a blog post urging all of you fine folks to stop creating new forms in InfoPath. It’s time to start taking the InfoPath end of life seriously and start looking at what the future of your forms in SharePoint looks like.

But what do you do about all those old InfoPath forms? We’ve talked to some people who have thousands of InfoPath forms! First of all… I’m so sorry… Second of all…  do you REALLY need all those thousands of forms today? I mean, sure… maybe the answer is yes. But is it really???  Your first step is to identify the forms you really need to convert and then have some sort of archival plan for the rest.

To help you convert the rest of those forms I created a simple tool and video to help you get started down the conversion path… now…  let me be clear about what I’m presenting for you here… This InfoPath Conversion Assistant and Process comes with the following caveats:

  1. This is not the “Silver Bullet” for all of your InfoPath conversion needs. It is both a helper tool and a teaching tool to help you learn how to convert your InfoPath forms into StratusForms (or some other HTML based forms tool)
  2. You WILL need to be comfortable with HTML
  3. For more complicated forms with dynamic views and business logic you WILL need to write some JavaScript.
  4. Hey… It’s a start… depending on the feedback I get I’ll add more functionality to it.

Now that I’ve C’d my B…. Let’s walk you through the process of converting your InfoPath form to StratusForms.  The steps you will take are as follows:

  1. Take your InfoPath form and rename it to have a “.cab” extension so you can extract the form HTML. (use 7-Zip https://www.7-zip.org/  if you have problems opening the cab file)
  2. Paste the Form HTML into the StratusForms Form Builder and InfoPath Conversion Assistant Tool
  3. Replace the InfoPath Form Fields with StratusForms Form Fields
  4. Add a save button (either SPFx or non-SPFx)
  5. Deploy the form to SharePoint using either the SPFx Web Part or a Content Editor Web Part (depending on your version of SharePoint).

Ta-and-Da

So, let’s get to it… Watch the video below as I go through all of the steps for converting an InfoPath form to StratusForms. One quick point, I don’t specifically call it out in the video, but you REALLY should go through your InfoPath HTML and remove all the XSL tags before publishing the form to production.

There you have it! It’s shockingly simple to convert simple InfoPath forms. However, when you get to more complicated forms you are going to have to be able to understand HTML and JavaScript to put the business logic in the form to show/hide fields and do other more intense functionality, but it’s all possible!

Links:

Form Builder and InfoPath Conversion Assitant:
http://stratusforms.com/form-builder/

SPFx Web Part for SharePoint 2016, 2019, and SharePoint Online:
https://www.stratusforms.com/spfx/1.55/stratus-forms.sppkg

GitHub repository for StratusForms:
https://github.com/mrackley/StratusForms



2 Comments

  1. I am using your HillBilly Template to customize some SharePoint Online Classic Forms and one of my clients wants to display a calculated field in an Edit Form. How can I accomplish this using the HillBilly Template?

    Thanks,

    • If the field is not on the default form, you can’t make it appear using the Hillbilly Template. You would need to make a REST query to the list and retrieve that field.

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