(I have originally published this article on the Orckestra’s Dot Net For Thougts Blog)

At least once in his career, a SharePoint developer is going to be faced with a security problem.

When a user executes an action in SharePoint, i.e. modifies an item in a list, the request on the server executes using the security context of the user. So, if the user does not have the right privileges to accomplish specific actions, the request could fail with a security exception.

A way to overcome this behaviour is to use the RunWithElevatedPrivileges method from the SPUtility class.

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Today, I ran into a strange error when I was developping a custom InfoPath enabling some cascading dropdown menus (this subject interests you? Take a look at the Cascading Dropdowns in Browser Forms article from the InfoPath Team Blog).

Here is the exception I encountered:

Unexpected end of file while parsing Name has occurred. Line 1, position 708. System.Xml.XmlException: Unexpected end of file while parsing Name has occurred. Line 1, position 708.[...]

After a lot of searches on the Internet, I’d found a very helpful post on the InfoPathDev forums.

To summarise, if the server on which you’re developing is running with Windows SharePoint Services SP1 (Service Pack 1), your InfoPath form must not have a useless secondary Data Connection (declared but not used at all on your form).

Very simple… if you know it!