Sitecore WFFM 8.1 and multilingual save actions

WFFM Save actions

Every Sitecore developer that had the 'pleasure' of working with WFFM knows about save actions, and probably also knows that save actions by default are shared. And so: not multilingual. In some cases this is no issue, but if you want to send an email to your visitor you might want to do that in his own language.

KB : Solution 2

A solution for this issue is given in https://kb.sitecore.net/articles/040124. Most people use "Solution 2":

Apply the following customization:

• Navigate to /sitecore/templates/Web Forms for Marketers/Form

• Uncheck "Shared" checkbox for the Save Action field.

After this change, you must add Save Actions to each language version of the form item. This means that each language of the form item will keep its own list of Save Actions.

The error

This works up until Sitecore 8.0, but when we tried this in Sitecore 8.1 with WFFM 8.1 we got this:

When we go to a form and switch to another language this nice error appears. Apparently the reason is simple: by making the save action field un-shared we caused empty values in some languages for that field. Sounds very logical indeed.

But Sitecore does not expect an empty value in that field, it expects some xml.

The fix (workaround)

1. Go to an affected form (in a working language)
2. Switch to "Raw values"
3. Open a needed language version of a form item.
4. Insert the following value into the Save Actions field:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-16"?>
 <li xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
   <g id="{E5EABB1F-40BC-45BB-8D87-3B6C239B521B}" displayName="Actions" 
     onclick="javascript:return scForm.postEvent(this,event,'forms:addaction')" />
 </li>

Switch back to normal view (and save). This xml will insert an empty save actions block and you are good to go.