Infopath multi-line textbox problem in SharePoint – maps to single line, truncated at 255 characters.

Consider the following scenario:

1. You use a multi-line textbox in InfoPath 2010 (or 2007) .

2. You promote this field to a column in SharePoint 2010 form library

3. The result – your multi-line field maps to Single Line type in SharePoint, therefore it is truncated at 255 characters. The data, after the 255th character, your users filled into the multi-line box in your form – is silently truncated and lost from SharePoint.

I contacted Microsoft support regarding the issue. It turns out, that they have an undocumented discrepancy with the way InfoPath 2010 and SharePoint work. As of the time I'm writing this, they say that they are not planning to fix it; they suggest using Rich Text Area instead of multi-line text box in InfoPath. The Rich Text Area control maps properly to SharePoint multi-line type.

I had a system that suffered from this bug. We tested the system before deployment, But we were not aware of this bug; we didn't fill more than 256 characters in the test phase. When users filled the forms, they filled the InfoPath text boxes with long sentences, the fields were truncated in SharePoint.

If you are facing a similar situation, you may want to use a special web part we developed to extract the texts from the XML files in the SharePoint library into an Excel document. It will not solve the SharePoint column problem, but it will give you back your aggregated data for work in Excel.

Here is a screen shot of our InfoPath to Excel Web part, if you need one please use our contact form.