midhun November 17th, 2008
For some strange reason I see that on one of the servers when we try to publish an InfoPath form, it gives the error – The following URL is not valid

InfoPath 2007 - The Following URL is not valid
I go into Central Administration -> Application Management -> InfoPath Forms Services and see for any configuration errors, nothing found. As usual I looked on Google if any one had already faced such a problem. I see Firedancer’s blog where the suggested solution was to Stop the System Event Notification Service. I tried that but no luck.

Services - System Event Notification Service
I stopped the service and tried to publish it but no luck. Then I saw an Anonymous comment in the same site that he moved the Site Collection to the root(/) and he was able to get the publishing work. I realized then that on this particular server we didn’t create a site collection on the root level but have been using the managed path (sites).
So I went ahead and created the site collection at the root path.

Top Level Site Successfully Created
Now I try the publishing process again. This time the Publishing Wizard goes through and the form is Published.

InfoPath Publishing Wizard

InfoPath Publishing Wizard

InfoPath Publishing Wizard

InfoPath Publishing Wizard

InfoPath Publishing Wizard
Now to investigate further, I deleted the site collection at the root and then tried the publishing process again. This time too the publishing process went through. I repeated this on another site collection just to confirm the result.
Summary:
- When you get the error “The following URL is not valid” in InfoPath 2007 when publishing an InfoPath form check if there is a site collection on the root path (/). If there was never a site collection created there and you don’t want a site collection there, just create the site collection, publish the InfoPath form where ever you wanted to publish and delete the site collection at root(/). Going forward there should not be any problems publishing InfoPath forms.
Tags: InfoPath 2007, MOSS 2007