InfoPath vs. Forms Designer, Too Many SharePoint Fields

[JoshuaSchafner]

Hello!

Question 1:
My company is seriously considering buying this product soon, but has one primary question:

Does Forms Designer handle many SharePoint list fields (150+ fields) better than InfoPath?

Background:
Our current issue is our InfoPath form has around 170 fields, and now when we try to publish an update, 8/10 times we get a "The SOAP message cannot be parsed". Our only solution is to continue clicking "publish" until we get a "SUCCESS!" message and the form actually updates.

In addition, even after we get a successful publish, the new InfoPath form takes 2-3 minutes to "reload" (and sometimes errors out, where we have to continually hit refresh until the form is actually updated).

Question 2:
Will Forms Designer handle this better? Or is this SharePoint server dependent, and we should expect to see the same issues with Forms Designer as well?

[AlexZver]

Dear Joshua,

The Forms Designer handles many SharePoint list fields (150+ fields) better than InfoPath for SharePoint On-Premises only. For SP Online, we recommend using Forms, it's our newest product. Both tools have trial versions.

[JoshuaSchafner]

Great!

How long does the trial period last? And what's the process for installing the trial software?

Thanks so much!

[Nikita Kurguzov]

Dear Joshua,
The trial lasts 30 days. I strongly recommend to use Plumsail Forms (Modern UI in Office365 or SharePoint 2019), as this product doesn't have a limit on the number of fields, you can start trial here - https://plumsail.com/forms/start-trial/

For Forms Designer (classic UI) which has a limit of around 70 fields, use the following link - https://spform.com/download

[JoshuaSchafner]

Thanks Nikita!

Plumsail Forms sounds great, but I'm assuming you need Office 365 or 2019? We're running a 2013 environment.

If I'm forced to use Forms Designer, when you mention the limit is "around 70 fields," what happens after 70 fields? My current form has in excess of 170 fields.

Thanks so much.

[Nikita Kurguzov]

Dear Joshua,
This might be an unsolvable issue at the moment then. You see, in SharePoint classic UI - default forms are rendered on the client, meaning on your PC, so they can contain large number of fields.

But all custom forms, including InfoPath, SharePoint designer, Forms Designer and other products - they have to render forms on the server. Server must render form quickly, in about 1 second, or it will give an error, because of slow response time.

That means that if you have more than 70 fields, with each field you increase the rendering time and thus increase chance for an error. It might still work, but would give errors on occasion.

We've managed to work around this issue in Plumsail Forms, by rendering forms on the client, but this is only possible with modern UI implementation, and it's only available in SharePoint Online and 2019 currently.

If you'll be using SharePoint 2013 and custom forms, you will need to break them apart, for example in 2 forms, to make sure that each has less than 70 editable fields.