InfoPath Tips #3-Promoting InfoPath fields properly and remove the Orphan Fields

In the age when every one is eating at fast food joints and addicted to the iPod, Microsoft provided us with a Quick Publish with InfoPath, it is easy to use but quite dangerous, you might end up with Orphan/Duplicate column in your Form library. My suggestion is almost use Publish Wizard and always match you fields to the site columns one by one *especially if* you are publishing a Form to a new SharePoint Server.

Orphan, it means the column of the form library doesn't belong to any content type; Duplicate means you could have one column belongs to a content type and another column with same *name* in the same library, the later often is an orphan.

To remove the Orphan column is a very painful process, and often you cannot do it using the SharePoint UI and have to use code.

I was planning to publish a utility I wrote just for this and put it on CodeProject, but CodeProject rejected it demanding a lot of formatting changes but I had no time for that, and on second thought as deleting a site column is a dangerous action to perform I decided not to release my code as a utility. As this issue is such a common one, other folks had written about their method of site column cleaning up as well, one that requires some of your own coding is this one:

http://nikspatel.wordpress.com/2010/08/07/delete-orphaned-workflow-status-columns-from-sharepoint-list-views/

(the idea behind my utility was after you selected a site list, the columns of this list that does NOT belong to ANY content type will be shown in a data grid this includes out of the box list columns and orphan columns from infopath or workflow, from there you could delete them one by one.)