The form has been closed / The specified form cannot be found – SharePoint 2007

Posted by Dave Mellors | Filed under Fixes to problems, SharePoint, Software Development


Having created my InfoPath 2007 Form, created my workflow in Visual Studio 2008 and clicked Deploy I found that my workflow went to In Progress but the Instantiation Form never displayed in SharePoint and all I got was a message “The form has been closed” on the screen. Looking in the log files I could see an error

Exception occurred during request processing. (User: MOSSDEV86\Administrator, Form Name: , IP: , Request:  Form ID: , Type: InfoPathLocalizedException, Exception Message: The specified form cannot be found.)

Looking in Central Administration > Application Management > Manage Form Templates I could see my workflow, status ready and workflow enabled but I still kept getting “The form has been closed”. After a reasonable amount swearing and pulling out of hair I realised that the Form ID specified in Manage Form Templates was different to the one I used in my workflow.xml file. HOW?????

Well, I was saving my InfoPath form and look at the properties to get the URN and then publishing the file to get deployed with my code. What I hadn’t realised was that when you publish the form you then get a different URN!

REMEMBER: Use the URN from the published form and not from the saved one!!!

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Permalink | 2 Comments » | March 30, 2010

2 Responses to “The form has been closed / The specified form cannot be found – SharePoint 2007”

  1. alexhu Says:
    June 22nd, 2010 at 8:02 am

    many thanks

  2. Hossein Says:
    October 6th, 2010 at 9:13 am

    Hey Dave,

    I been searching all over the net for a solution to this issue. After browsing 100 or so sites, your blog solved my problem.

    Thanks a lot!

    You got my vote for SharePoint MVP ;)

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