In working with Sitecore 9 forms, you might occasionally get the “There are no forms to display” when you go to the Forms designer area as seen below:
No Forms To Display
This is pretty typical actually as the Forms are indexed in the “sitecore_master_index”, and I have seen this happen after doing custom form fields, validations, and submit actions. But simply re-index and voila, you will see your forms. Our fellow MVP brethren, Jason Wilkerson, put up a post about this, which you can read in much more detail regarding re-indexing:
Sitecore 9 Forms: form doesn’t show up after creation
Now, with that being said, I have found that this is NOT the only time this can occur. At some point, my forms disappeared from the Form Designer completely, and no matter how many times I re-indexed they never came back to existence.
If re-indexing doesn’t work try renaming the form to something else, then save the form, and go back into the Forms Designer. You should see the form now there. Now, rename the form back to it’s original name, and you are good to go. I have seen this odd behavior in Sitecore 9.0 (Update 1). If this doesn’t work then continue on with this blog post.
After a couple weeks of not seeing my forms it was a MUST that I had to have the Forms Designer back not only me and my local development, but for the client as well. This bug had propagated it’s way from LOCAL to DEV & QA at this point. Before we are to go-live it MUST be fixed. So I really started getting after finding a solution!
My first stop was the always trusted and solid Sitecore community. I went to the Sitecore Stack Exchange at https://sitecore.stackexchange.com for help. I posted up this question and the community had nothing for me, but I quickly learned that I was NOT alone with this bug:
No forms are displaying in Sitecore 9 Forms area
Being that Sitecore 9 Forms are a tad bit new to the community we are all still learning these forms one day at a time so there wasn’t much to go off of for any of us in this situation, and most were busy, and didn’t have time to look into. So my next stop was Sitecore Support. I put in a ticket with Sitecore Support. About 24 hours later they came back asking me for my .configs and me to run a test through Fiddler to see what was going on. Once I got them what they needed, they got me what I needed, which was the answer. The Sitecore Support team saw from Fiddler that the requests for available forms returned an error, which is below:
4268 07:53:01 ERROR [Item Web API] Value cannot be null.
Parameter name: item
Exception: System.ArgumentNullException
Message: Value cannot be null.
Parameter name: item
Source: Sitecore.Kernel
at Sitecore.Diagnostics.Assert.ArgumentNotNull(Object argument, String argumentName)
at Sitecore.ContentSearch.SitecoreIndexableItem..ctor(Item item)
at Sitecore.ItemWebApi.Pipelines.Request.Search.RunSearchPipeline(RequestArgs args, String searchText, String languageName, Boolean showHiddenItems)
at Sitecore.ItemWebApi.Pipelines.Request.Search.Process(RequestArgs args)
at (Object , Object[] )
at Sitecore.Pipelines.CorePipeline.Run(PipelineArgs args)
at Sitecore.Pipelines.DefaultCorePipelineManager.Run(String pipelineName, PipelineArgs args, String pipelineDomain)
at Sitecore.ItemWebApi.Pipelines.HttpRequest.LaunchRequest.Process(HttpRequestArgs arguments)
They had me navigate to the {60F35FD9-88CB-4DF5-8E78-1E9BF5FE181C} item in the core database. That item is seen below:
Sitecore 9 Search Config Item
As you can see from above the Root field is pointed at {B701850A-CB8A-4943-B2BC-DDDB1238C103}. When I put this ID in my search bar and searched the Master database content tree, there was NO results. I decided to get with one of my co-workers who had a working instance of Sitecore 9 Forms, and had them search for this item in the Master database content tree. BOOM! Once they ran the search, the Forms folder, which contains all the forms, came back as a result.
Wrong ID For Forms Folder
When I saw that I had the wrong Forms folder ID, I knew that somewhere along the check-in source control travels someone must have deleted the original Forms folder, and then created a new Forms folder with a different ID. Because of this one simple change by a developer the Forms Designer was now rendered useless and ineffective. This is something to be aware of!
The solution to this issue is this:
- Do NOT delete the Forms folder and create a new one if you don’t need to!
- If you do delete the Forms folder, get it from another instance of Sitecore 9.
- If for some reason you want to run with a Forms folder with a different ID then you must change to this ID for your new Forms folder in the Root field of these items below in the Core database:
SearchConfig: {60F35FD9-88CB-4DF5-8E78-1E9BF5FE181C}
AllFormsSearchConfig: {60F35FD9-88CB-4DF5-8E78-1E9BF5FE181C}
My recommendation is to NOT opt for #3 as this will get away from you, and your client down the road unless you document it, keep for future reference, and refer to for future upgrades. Ain’t nobody got time for that! Just opt to get on Slack and ask someone for the OOTB Forms folder item in a package, move all your forms into the correct OOTB Forms folder and you are all set. Happy coding!
Sitecore Sandbox 