SharePoint Relink InfoPath Forms (Relink Documents)

I'm in a situation where I have hundreds of InfoPath forms stored within a Form Library within SharePoint. I have to update the form template every now and then, recently it has been more now then then, but I was very tired of clicking the little check box next to Relink Form in the Relink Documents view 600+ times.

So I set off to figure out how to do this programmatically for an entire SharePoint library. There is no documentation on how to do this within SharePoint. I even asked the supposed SharePoint experts at TechEd but their answer was way off base. Very disappointing. Today I decided to finally figure this one out.

SharePoint gives us a submitrepair.aspx page that handles doing the relinking, the actual page can be found in the C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\LAYOUTS directory. Open that file up and take a look. WOW!!! MS actually did some inline code that will help us out. In fact, the code in that page does it all for us and is the basis for the windows app I wrote to do it. Note that the windows app has to be run from a SharePoint server, so ideally a web part should be written to do this but a windows app works for me so I'm sticking with that, you'll probably want a web part if you want to reuse this solution.

Anyway, my windows app has two text boxes one for the SharePoint site url and one for the list guid and then a button to relink the form. Here are the guts of it, if you'll notice it's very similar to the submitrepair.aspx page. It works and now saves me a good 15 minutes everytime I need to relink the forms to the new template.

private bool RelinkDocuments()
{
try
{
SPSite site = new SPSite(txtSiteUrl.Text.Trim());
SPWeb spWeb = site.OpenWeb();
SPList spList = spWeb.Lists[new Guid(txtListGuid.Text.Trim())];
SPDocumentLibrary doclib = (SPDocumentLibrary)spList;
string solutionUrl = SPHttpUtility.UrlPathEncode(spWeb.Url + "/" + doclib.DocumentTemplateUrl, true);

foreach (SPListItem spItem in doclib.Items) //loop through the list items
{
SPFieldCollection spFields = spItem.Fields;

foreach (SPField spField in spFields) //loop through fields resetting them
{
if (spField.Type != SPFieldType.Computed &&
spField.Type != SPFieldType.Invalid && !spField.ReadOnlyField)
{
try
{
spItem[spField.InternalName] = spItem[spField.InternalName];
}
catch (Exception e)
{
}
}
}

SPContentType spContentType = spList.ContentTypes[(SPContentTypeId)spItem["ContentTypeId"]];
if (spContentType != null) //try to update the item with the content type's template url which is the updated one
{
if (spContentType.DocumentTemplate.StartsWith("http://") ||
spContentType.DocumentTemplate.StartsWith("https://"))
{
spItem["TemplateUrl"] = SPHttpUtility.UrlPathEncode(spContentType.DocumentTemplate, true);
}
else if (spContentType.DocumentTemplate.StartsWith("/"))
{
spItem["TemplateUrl"] = SPHttpUtility.UrlPathEncode(spWeb.Site.MakeFullUrl(spContentType.DocumentTemplate), true);
}
else
{
spItem["TemplateUrl"] = SPHttpUtility.UrlPathEncode(spWeb.Url + '/' + spList.RootFolder + '/' + spContentType.DocumentTemplate, true);
}
}
else //no content type found so default template url to solution Url
{
spItem["TemplateUrl"] = solutionUrl;
}
spItem.Update();

}

return true;
}
catch (Exception ex)
{
return false;
}
}