Anonymous Form Submission to Form Library with InfoPath in MOSS

Here’s a bit of a trick I ran across while helping to develop some MOSS2007 solutions.

I needed to configure InfoPath so that it could submit documents to a site that the submitter would not be able to access. In SharePoint, this is not directly possible.

A common work-around is to set up incoming email for the target list, and submit by email to that. Unfortunately, my client is part-way through a Notes to Exchange migration, so this wasn’t practical in the given time frame.

The solution… create two sites, one that is accessible to the submitter, and the other that is not. On the accessible site, create a new, “hidden” list that the user can submit to. Add an event receiver to that list, such that whenever a new item is added, the item is moved to the real intended target using elevated privileges.

Using VSeWSS extensions, create a List Definition project that has something like this in the ItemEventReciever.cs file:

using System;
using System.Security.Permissions;
using System.Runtime.InteropServices;
using Microsoft.SharePoint;
using Microsoft.SharePoint.Security;
using Microsoft.SharePoint.Utilities;
using VSeWSS;

namespace AutoForwardingFormLibrary
{
    [CLSCompliant(false)]
    [TargetList("38aea319-af78-4489-9059-d124c68bf9fe")]
    [Guid("9d0f139b-d9ed-4b6c-b0ba-2353cb3bad85")]
    public class AutoForwardingFormLibraryItemEventReceiver : SPItemEventReceiver
    {
        private SPListItem addedItem = null;

        /// 

        /// Initializes a new instance of the Microsoft.SharePoint.SPItemEventReceiver class.
        /// 

        public AutoForwardingFormLibraryItemEventReceiver()
        {
        }

        /// 

        /// Asynchronous after event that occurs after a new item has been added to its containing object.
        /// 

        /// 
        /// A Microsoft.SharePoint.SPItemEventProperties object that represents properties of the event handler.
        /// 
        public override void ItemAdded(SPItemEventProperties properties)
        {
            addedItem = properties.ListItem;
            if (addedItem == null)
            {
                throw new ArgumentNullException("properties.ListItem");
            }
            SPSecurity.CodeToRunElevated moveItem = moveItem_Elevated;
            SPSecurity.RunWithElevatedPrivileges(moveItem_Elevated);
        }

        private void moveItem_Elevated()
        {
            addedItem.CopyTo(SPUrlUtility.CombineUrl("http://targetserver/sites/jimw/docs/formlibrary", addedItem.Name));
            addedItem.Delete();
        }
    }
}