In my last post on creating a MOSS State Machine, I walked through the process of creating InfoPath forms for use in a MOSS workflow.
In the process of working on the next post — the one where the InfoPath forms provide information to the workflow code — I got tripped up by something that I’ve run into before and managed to forget. So hopefully by writing it down, I’ll remember sooner next time I have the problem. 🙂
Here’s the pearl of wisdom: If you are a creating a workflow and specifying different InfoPath forms for the InitiationForm and AssociationForm, your forms must contain the same XML schema.
I’d be interested to understand the "why" of this particular design; Microsoft’s documentation seems to be mute on the subject. If you try to run a workflow with different initiation and association forms that contain different XML schemas, your association form will display fine but the initiation form will die with an XML schema error. It seems that MOSS provides the association data to the initiation form as XML and if the schemas don’t match, an error occurs. (I’m indebted to Gudjon for pointing me in the right direction on this particular issue.)
