Outlook 365 Custom forms field limit?

[DaveM]

Hello,

I have some custom forms which I built a few years ago which have worked without incident until the last few days. The first user reported that the forms weren't working yesterday morning but were working fine on Friday. When I checked yesterday I found I too was having issues. The forms reside in public folders. I have custom contact forms which still work fine and custom appointment forms which are the ones having issues.

We are all using Window 10 machines (updated from Windows 7 a couple weeks ago) and are O365 hosted Exchange. My current Office version is 16.0.16026.20146

When I go to save a custom appointment, I get the following error message:

"All custom fields cannot be created, because the allowed limit has been reached. For more information, contact your Microsoft Exchange Administrator."

When I go to open a custom appointment, I get the following error message:

"The custom form cannot be opened. Outlook will use an Outlook form instead. Unknown Error." followed by the error message:

"Sorry, we're having trouble opening this item. This could be temporary, but if you see it again you might want to restart Outlook. Unknown Error."


The following troubleshooting steps have been taken:
- Restart Outlook
- Reboot PC
- Clear Form Cache
- Rename FRMCACHE.DAT to FRMCACHE.OLD
- Repair Outlook (Quick and Online Repair)
- Deleted seldom used custom fields from Custom Appointment Form

I didn't see any Microsoft updates from over the weekend. Unsure where to go from here, but getting this working again would be very helpful.

Any assistance or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks for your time,

Dave M

 

[Diane Poremsky]

There isn't a limit on the number of fields but if I recall correctly, too many text fields can be a problem.

Do you have the form published to more than one folder or library?

When you cleared the cache, did you delete the forms subfolders in
C:\Users\diane\AppData\Local\Microsoft\FORMS ?

 

[Diane Poremsky]

Do you know how many fields you have?

I checked with Karl Timmermans, the now-retired developer of contact genie.
>>
if memory serves me correctly – the max number is 255. With that said, the other number that comes to mind is 192 for some reason keeping in mind that even the standard fields come into play. Lemme put it this way, if anyone comes even close to whatever the limit is – they gonna be in a world of hurt. Saw some really large custom forms in my time and none worked well on any level
<<

 

[DaveM]

Hi Diane,

Thanks for the quick reply. I didn't delete the subfolders in the FORMS folder when I renamed the cache. It's been a while since I've worked with these forms and couldn't remember if deleting them was an issue.

I don't think I am near the number of fields but I can go back and check that. I haven't done any type of development on these forms in probably 3 or more years so the field count has been the same since then. I find it odd that everything has worked fine for all this time and then all of a sudden, I have major issues.

We are looking to migrate this process to a PowerApp later in the year. I just need a couple more months.. lol

 

[Diane Poremsky]

I have no idea what triggered it to fail now.

You could try saving the form in Froms manager as an FDM.

Do you have a backup copy of the form? Are there two copies published - one in the public folder, another in personal forms library or elsewhere?

Karl added this -

Will make 2 comments about this guy’s form without even seeing it and those are

#1 – If he got the error message “All custom fields cannot be created, because the allowed limit has been reached.” Then he needs to seriously go back to the drawing board and try and reorganize the form

OR

#2 – His custom form is f*k’d (or both)

Either way – seriously doubt that he will be able to fix it. Other thing to keep in mind is a mistake a lot of people made which was to create custom fields using the standard Outlook field names which didn’t help things any – that and there was no real way to “remove” a field from the underlying form structure even when deleting it from the form via the UI.