The SOAP message cannot be parsed.

In SharePoint 2010, I had customer requirement to add new fields to the existing InfoPath form for one Custom List with large data. For this I started editing InfoPath form with the tool MS InfoPath Designer 2010 (which comes with MS Office).

To edit the form, you can click on “Customize Form” ribbon button inside the “List” Tab, It will open form in InfoPath designer tool.

I added some new fields to the form and tried to publish the form using either of the below marked actions.

But in design checker it thrown exception “Control binding is not supported” for 3 different calculated value fields. I managed to resolve this issue with the help of this blog.

Again I clicked on “Quick Publish” to publish the form, this time there were no more these above 3 exceptions and now it took long time but publishing failed with following error.

The publish operation could not be completed. It cannot be determined if the form template was successfully published. Try publishing the form template again, or change the list settings to use the default SharePoint form.

-          The SOAP message cannot be parsed.

The exception was not at all leading me to the right direction. When checked the ULS logs there was no specific and helpful error found. There was also no problem with permissions to the list. User was having Full Control.

After googling for some time, following solutions were found for this particular error:

• Increased the executionTimeout value in web.config and set it to 3600 seconds. But in my case it was already set in web.config <httpRuntime maxRequestLength=”2097151″ executionTimeout=”3600″ />
• 
  
• Tried increasing data connection timeout values (to 1 hr) from central administrator for InfoPath Forms Services

• Checked whether site collection feature “SharePoint Server Enterprise Site Collection Features” is activated. In my case this feature was already activated.

• Tried updating missing bindings for some dropdown controls
• Tried with removing all calculated value fields from InfoPath form.
• Tried changing name of the template.xsn and ID
• Traced InfoPath form publishing in Fiddler and tried to get answers for exception in response i,e.“Request timed out” with status as HTTP 302. All answers lead to the same above resolutions which were already tried.
• Tried restoring site collection again
• Tried with new custom list and for it InfoPath forms publishing was working correctly
• Tried importing changed/saved template by SharePoint designer and then renamed it. 
• But it showed the following error when I clicked “Add new item” link

Unfortunately no single option from above helped me.

But after trying all these above options, again I given a thought on “Request timed out” exception from Fiddler. Even though I tried increasing all timeout values above, I was googling more on this issue. After spending lot of time on this, found that few of the blogs mentioned about huge lists cases means list with large number of items and it was true for this list as well. It was having around 4500 items.

So I decided to reduce items batch wise (max 100 at one batch) from the list and let it go to the recycle bin. I was also checking form publishing simultaneously during this process. It was still failing. But as it was gradually decreasing the number of items in the list, it finally reached that level when InfoPath Form Publishing was successful J

The magic number was around 1500 items. When I checked it multiple times, I found that above this level, form was not able to publish. The reason for this may be because Form was containing 25 calculated values and hence publishing was failing for large items.

Now as the reason was known, it was needed (for publishing updated form with new changes) to either move items above 1500 to similar duplicate list and then again move those back OR Delete those items and then restore it back from the recycle bin. That’s It!

Note: FYI, during this process, I faced this different exception as well during publishing

The SharePoint list form can't be customized with InfoPath because fields of an unsupported data type are marked as required, or because fields are corrupted. In SharePoint, try deleting the columns or editing the column properties to remove the required attribute.

-          ABC (Lookup)

The solution for this was I had to remove columns from the SharePoint list and then refreshed the InfoPath Form. Then deleted dropdown list control from Form and then again added it with binding to the Lookup list column. Publishing was successful.

Happy Learning! J