Problems with XForms when upgrading to CMS 6 R2

It seems that many people have had problems when upgrading an EPiServer CMS site to 6 R2 with the last part of the upgrade script.

What this tries to do is read all the XForm definitions from the database, perform a html decode on the form name, and then save the definition back to the database. Why this has to be done is not relevant to this post.

What is relevant is that it often doesn’t work for various reasons. This part of the script is run in a separate transaction after the main upgrade transaction has completed. The reason for this is that it has to run in a separate application domain in the context of the website.

If your site doesn’t use XForms or if you know that there aren’t any forms that have names that required html encoding then you can just ignore this error. As mentioned above, the main upgrade has been committed and your site should be ready to go.

If however you do need to run this part of the script and it keeps failing then there is a simple workaround.

Here you will find an ASPX file which contains the same code as the script executes. Place it in your site, execute it (i.e. browse to it’s Url) and it will do the business. When it’s finished it will tell you how many XForms it’s upgraded. If for some reason it should fail or get interrupted, it is safe to run again as it will only upgrade those XForms that need it.

When all is done you can just remove the ASPX from the site.

Voilà