Upgrading to SP2013

[Chris Bolton]

We are planning to upgrade from SharePoint 2010 to 2013 and wondered what was involved in moving users forms to the new farm. I'm assuming the forms aren't stored in the content databases so we'd need to ask users to save their forms (export) to their local workstations and then re-import them once 2013 is stood up. However this seems prone to errors as users could forget which forms they have so:

A) am I right in assuming forms will not be moved when we detach content databases from 2010, attach and upgrade in the new 2013 farm and we do need to export all forms and re-import them?
B) Is there anyway we can inventory all user build forms in our current 2010 environment to ensure we don't miss any in the migrations assuming A is not the case?

Thanks in Advance

[Nikita Kurguzov]

Hello, Chris!
1) Yes, if you want to migrate to 2013 you'll need to export and import forms in the designer:

ExportFormsDesigner.png (9.17 KiB) Viewed 58612 times

2) You can use Sharepoint Designer, for example, to go through the lists and libraries, where you can check if the list or library has forms starting with fd_....aspx

Finally, you can also use Powershell to migrate the forms programmatically.

[Chris Bolton]

Thanks Nikita

The enumeration I can take care off, however do you have an API I can use detach and attach the forms? or is it a case of using native SP functions?

Regards

[Nikita Kurguzov]

You are welcome, Chris!
Check out this forum topic for Forms provisions - viewtopic.php?f=1&t=416&hilit=Forms+des ... +provision
Let me know if you'll have any questions.

[Chris Bolton]

Thanks again Nikita

This seems to take care of the provisioning to the new 2013 environment, but how about export from 2010? We may have a situation with 1000's of forms to be migrated over, it's a very large farm with over 100,000 users and 20,000+ sites

Cheers

[Nikita Kurguzov]

Hello, Chris!
In the same topic I've send you, you can find information about exporting forms - viewtopic.php?f=1&t=416&hilit=Forms+des ... n&start=10

Hi Andrew,

What do you mean? Do you want to export a form with the help of the web service? You can retrieve layouts of forms from the site's properties (property bag):

Code: Select all

fd_{listID}_{contentTypeID}_{formType}

We do not have other documentation on this service but this is just a WCF-service with the description:
/_vti_bin/FormsDesigner/FDService.svc/mex?wsdl

So, you can generate a proxy with the help of ServiceModel Metadata Utility Tool or directly from Visual Studio:
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/librar ... .110).aspx

And use it to communicate with the service.

You can export forms either in Forms Designer (Export button on the ribbon) or directly from the site's property bag:
https://lixuan0125.wordpress.com/2013/1 ... g-by-csom/

The keys are built in accordance with the following patterns:

Code: Select all

fd_{list name}_{content type name}_{form type} (FD 3.x )
fd_{list id}_{content type id}_{form type} (FD 2.x )

You can find them in SharePoint Designer:
Open the site -> Home -> Site Options (button on the ribbon)

It's the same for 2013 and 2010, so it should work for you. What you need to do is to is just export the forms programmatically and then deploy them to the new environment.