Andy Burns’ SharePoint Blog

This is a pretty weird error. I was doing content roll-up of Announcements lists, to give a unified news channel for our intranet. Naturally, I decided to do this using the Content Query Web Part. I added one, and selected that I wanted to query for the contents of Announcements lists. As I like RSS feeds, I enabled one, and I added it to my favorite feed-reader.

It worked – but the links to the announcements themselves didn’t work. The short summary is that is that it appears RSS feeds from Content Query Web Parts don’t work when you query for certain types of list. Read more »

Tags: Content Rollup, CQWP, Error, RSS

SharePoint has a lot of page elements, and it’s hard to brand it all without missing things. Lists of Page elements like Heather Solomon’s CSS Reference Chart and her “Oh crap, I missed that” list help, but I still found a few that weren’t mentioned. So, I guess this is my “Thank God my testing found I’d missed that” list:

	Advanced Search Page – nice grey.
	Creation Information Panel – when you hover over an item on the ‘Create’ page, you’ll see this.
	People Search Options – shown dynamically when you click the link.
	Gantt views - as used in projects
	Repeating Meeting Left Nav
	WSS Search results page – just ‘cos you’re using it doesn’t mean it isn’t there – or that it won’t be seen…
	The Date Picker – and all the problems inherent in that…

Tags: Branding, CSS, Error

I was tempted to call this “The incredible case of the bust rendering of SharePoint pages”, but it seemed a bit long, to be honest. This is a bit of a detective story (and if I’d the developer who built this in the first place, there’d be a murder) so stick with me… Read more »

Tags: CSS, Error, JavaScript

So, I was doing some testing of some branding, and I took a look at the Survey list. I tried filling out a survey and was shocked by a yellow screen of death:

This was because I’d set SharePoint up for debugging during development. The SharePoint error page appears:

Well, the error is right – I was trying to fill in the survey twice. But it’s not like this is an unexpected error – it certainly shouldn’t be an unhandled exception!

What are the problems with this? Well, it kicks us out of the branding experience I’ve built, which is annoying. It doesn’t allow the user to navigate anywhere. And, dammit, it’s just bad practice! I mean, do these errors appear in the logs?

Don’t get me wrong, no code is perfect and exceptions will happen. That’s fine. But who the hell thought unhandled exceptions was a good bit of deliberate functionality?

Anyone else found other deliberately unhandled exceptions?

Tags: Error

I’d built a .wsp (Web Solutions Package) for a customer, containing the branding I’ve been working on. However, when they tried the command:

stsadm -o addsolution -filename branding.wsp

they got the error:

Object reference not set to an instance of an object. c:\branding.wsp: The Solution installation failed.

Interesting – works on my machine. They were running the command as the ‘Administrator’ user on the SharePoint system. A bit of digging, though, showed that the problem was due to either:

• Not running under a Farm Admin account (which I understand the ‘Administrator’ user was)
• Not having rights to the Central Admin Content Database on SQL server.

Well, we tried running the STSADM command as the service account, and that appeared to work. ‘Course, this is all over the phone so I’m not certain what permissions that account has, but it appeared to run.

Tags: Error, STSADM

I got a slightly obscure error message when trying to run a DeleteTask activity in my workflow:

System.InvalidOperationException: Correlation value specified does not match the already initialized correlation value on declaration taskToken for activity deleteTask1.

Hmm. I checked the correlation token though – and it was fine. And what’s it doing initialising another token? Found the answer though, courtesy of Matt Morse - I’d not set the task ID property for the delete task activity.

This did lead me around to wondering why I have to? I mean, we’ve a correlation token for the task. The correlation token contains the TaskID. And yet I have to specify both of these things to the DeleteTask activity to identify the task I want deleted? Something ain’t right there…

Tags: Error, Tasks, Workflow

You can tell you’re using Infopath and SharePoint workflow when nothing works. I was using STSADM to verify a form template, and I kept getting an error. The error I was getting was:

FatalErrorNoThrow : This form template has not been correctly published to be browser-enabled. Open the form template in InfoPath Design mode, and click Publish Form Template in the Design Tasks task pane. Follow the steps in the Publishing Wizard to republish the form template, and then try again.

Gee, thanks. Advice to ‘try again’. Useful.

It transpires that the problem was from when publishing the InfoPath form; you have to make sure that the access path in the publishing wizard is empty. Fortunately, I now know enough about Infopath to have no idea that this is about – but making the access path empty did seem to work…

Make sure that the box highlighted in yellow is empty.

Tags: Error, Infopath, Workflow

It’s been a mad few weeks, so sorry for the posts tailing off a bit. Anyway, let’s get back into it with an interesting (and fairly short) problem.

ASP.NET applications can have custom error pages for the different HTTP responses. For example, you can have a custom “404 – Page not found”. Now, this can be a good idea, particularly for errors that produce stack traces or provide potentially sensitive information about the workings of your code. Or, heck, maybe you just want to present a nice looking error page. Read more »

Tags: ASP.NET, Error

I was trying to delete a master page in SharePoint designer, and I got the error “This item cannot be deleted because it is still referenced by other pages”. This was strange, as we knew that the master page had been reset for all sites in the site collection. We simply couldn’t find a reference.

Well, it turns out that this is a bug, and that Katrien De Graeve has an answer – create a folder, move the master page into the folder, delete the folder. Bizarre, but it works. And I have no idea how the heck they figured that out…

Tags: Error, Master Pages, SharePoint Designer