For a current project, I am back to wonderful world of SharePoint 2013 and InfoPath! I was amazed at how easy it all came back and how working and publishing forms could be so easy. Nevertheless, I was confronted with an issue I didn’t know how to resolve.

This title might be slightly cryptic so let me describe the scenario we were in: For a customer, we had a SharePoint 2013 top level site that would create project subsites based on a master list. Every subsite had a specific list that contained mandatory look up values as metadata.

To make matters more difficult, we also had to show the list form in InfoPath.

We had an issue with saving the form because the lookup field never thought it was filled in. Only when we made the field not-mandatory our form would be saved. And this one really had to be mandatory and we started to think on how we could get a workaround for it..

Thankfully a brilliant coworker (Thanks Ward!) could help us out with this one..

The solution is to have the form load without any default values. But wait, I hear you say, I don’t have any default values for this field? I know, but still you have to change it..

So how do you set it up?

Step 1: go to info – Advanced Form options

Step 2: in the Advanced tab , go to default values

Step 3: find the field in the datafields group and deselect the field

Now publish the InfoPath form and it should work.