Watch your Ports When Configuring AAMs

Found (the hard way) that SharePoint 2010 is not happy when an Alternate Access Mapping is configured with a port on the public URL that is different than the port on the corresponding Internal URLs.

For an extranet I was creating using SharePoint Foundation 2010, we were using port 80 on the external-facing side of the firewall. The firewall was redirecting those calls to port 81 on an internal IP address. So I had setup the extranet zone in AAM to have [some site]:80 as the public URL, and [some internal ip address]:81 as an Internal URL in that same zone.

[Various reasons for not using host headers in this instance, and for using port 81 for the SharePoint web app!]

Could access the site inside the firewall, but failed to get to the SharePoint pages from outside. Much analysis using Fiddler and the MS Network Monitor 3.4 (great tool, that one - really easy parsing of results) revealed that something was redirecting the client from [some site]:80 to [some site]:81 for the external calls. Still don't know whether IIS or SharePoint was responsible for this - just know that by changing the firewall to pass through on port 81, and calling [some site]:81 from outside, then all was well again.

So what I learnt today - don't mix ports across AAM internal and external URLs

SPServices Error With GetListItems Call

If you get an error similar to "Guid should contain 32 digits with 4 dashes" when making an SPServices Web Service call to the GetListItems operation, check the premissions on the list you are querying - I got this error returned from the call, and found that the list permissions were set so that the current user did not have read permissions.

Granting read access to the user instantly removed the issue :)

SharePoint Error for One User - The File Exists

Today had an interesting support issue to investigate. Of all the users on a SharePoint intranet, one person was unable to upload documents - each attempt to upload a document to a document library resulted in the "Access Denied" page. And the ULS log revealed little of value even in verbose mode.

The other strange thing was that this user is configured as the site collection owner, and was able to create document libraries fine. But then could not add a document to the document library he had just created!

Finally got some clues when I removed that account from the site owner SharePoint group (just in case that group was causing the behaviour). When I tried to add the account back to that group, an error page displayed with the useful(?) message "The file exists (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80070050)". At least that helped to confirm that the issue was in the user account.

A bit of research revealed this post on the subject - seems likely that the SID for the account has changed at some point. The described fix is to modify the SID in one of the SharePoint database tables. That's a bit of a worry, given that fiddling with the database content is like confusing a Kiwi accent for an Australian - to be avoided. But it may be the only approach available. Let me know if you try it out and it works for ya.

Roadblocks in the Install of Server 2008 R2 and SharePoint 2010 Beta

First up in my path to getting SharePoint 2010 running in a Hyper-V VM was the case of the missing roles in Windows Server 2008 R2, caused by a Windows update that failed to install.

For some unpleasant reason, KB971468 had failed to install correctly, following the cancellation of the install of KB890830 (the windows update panel had stopped mid-install, and the progress bar just stayed where it was). The outcome of this was that no roles displayed in the Server Manager - instead just an error message.

With the help of some worried searching, I came across this article by Glafkos Charalambous explaining the fix - use the System Update Readiness Tool from Microsoft to discover the faulty update files, then manually extract those files from the relevant update packages and copy them to the updates folder.

Once I had replaced the bad MUM files (wonder if there are DAD files anywhere in the system, too??), then I couls rerun the other updates that were marked as failed in the Windows Update History.

Hey, honey, I got my roles back!

WSPBuilder Fails to Copy Assembly to GAC

Small tip I just found when having an issue using the WSPBuilder "Copy to GAC" option.

For this one particular web part assembly, when selecting that WSPBuilder "Copy to GAC" option from the context menu in Visual Studio, the copy operation failed with the following message:

System.BadImageFormatException: The module was expected to contain an assembly manifest

Examining the references in that Visual Studio project, I found that one reference for some reason had the "Copy Local" property set to True. By setting this to False (and thereby matching the settings for all the other references), the assembly successfully copies to the GAC using WSPBuilder

The "Open With Windows Explorer" Action Fails - Nothing Happens!

If the "Open with Windows Explorer" action on a list or document library in SharePoint (WSS or MOSS) fails to open a view of the folder in Windows Explorer, check that the WebClient service is running on the machine on which you are viewing the site.

This occurred for me when attempting to view documents in a Windows Explorer view on a Server 2003 box - the Explorer view simply would not open even though the option was available. Temporarily enabling and starting th WebClient service (using the Services administrative tool) instantly cured the problem. I stopped the service on completion of the use of Explorer, as it may present a potential security vulnerability.

The Webclient service not running also prevents you from adding a Network Drive mapping to SharePoint lists and libraries through the Add Network Place Wizard.

Thanks to a posting from Mart Muller for this fix.

Missing Page Editing Toolbar? Breadcrumb Links Wrong?

If a SharePoint site is being accessed through a router or a proxy server, a missing Alternate Access Mapping (AAM) setting can cause all sorts of strange and seemingly unrelated issues. Here are a few symptoms that I experienced recently when viewing a SharePoint publishing site exposed through a router:

• The Page Editing toolbar was missing on publishing pages. The toolbar did not display when the "Edit Page" option was selected on the site actions button
• The "Show Page Editing Toolbar" option was greyed out (disabled) in the Site Actions menu
• The links to the site home page in the breadcrumb trail and from the tab in the top navigation bar failed to open a page (page not found)

These were all caused by the fact that the URL used to request the pages through the router differed from the URL passed to the SharePoint server by the router. And that is the purpose of the Alternate Access Mappings. Adding the appropriate AAM values cured the problems, and also improved the rendering speed of pages in the site.

For more on AAM, see the excellent series of articles named "What every SharePoint administrator needs to know about Alternate Access Mappings" on the Microsoft SharePoint Team Blog:

1. Part 1
2. Part 2
3. Part 3

Missing Buttons and Link on the Add Web Part Page

Beware when tweaking page widths in SharePoint! I was attempting to set the page width to a set size by applying a width style to the ms-main CSS class in a SharePoint site. Easy-peasy, job done.

But wait! When I went to add a web part to a page in this site by clicking on the "Add a Web Part" link at the top of a web part zone, the resulting popup page had no buttons!

First task - look at the source of that page. But which page creates that popup? By running Fiddler and clicking on a link to open that popup, the capture in Fiddler showed the page name to be "webpartgallerypickerpage.aspx" in the LAYOUTS folder in the 12 hive.

Even better it meant I could open that page in Firefox by pasting in the complete URL as recorded by Fiddler. Which in turn meant I could use Firebug to spot from where the classes in the page are sourced.

It turns out that this popup page uses the site master page and stylesheet, causing the main table in the popup window to be set to my fixed width - a width greater that the set width of the popup window. The popup is configured to show no scroll bars - hence the disappearing content!

Luckily the content table in the "webpartgallerypickerpage.aspx" has an ID of "mainTable" which is not applied to the table in other SharePoint pages. Therfore I could apply a special width in CSS to the table appearing in this popup.

Problem solved for that page, now I'd better check whether that table ID is used elsewhere...

WSS Search and Breadcrumb Links Fail over SSL

A site originally extended for extranet access needed to be now served over SSL, so I extended a new web application to enable this, and modified the external Alternate Access Mapping entry to be https rather than http.

The site was then successfully accessible on the internet, though I did notice that the full path had to be entered in the browser address bar, including the page name itself - for example, https://[siteurl]/default.aspx rather than just https://[siteurl].

Further testing revealed that the links in the breadcrumbs all led to a "Page cannot be diaplayed" IE error, and submitting a search on the site gave an error message on the results page that stated:

"If the URL should be serving existing content, the system administrator may need to add a new request url mapping to the intended application"

The cause was all in the AAM entry - I had a port number (80) in the extranet URLs from some early trials, and had not removed this port number when setting https. By setting the Extranet zone AAM internal URL and public URL to be simply https://[ssiteurl], these problems were solved.

Interesting that the pages were still accessible with an incorrect Access Mapping!

VMWare Virtual Machine 'Failed to Lock the File'

Scary moment occurred last week when one of my virtual machines failed to start from VMWare Workstation. The reported error was "failed to lock the file". A bit of searching revealed that I needed to delete the .LCK file in the VM's folder.

The cause for this (I think) was that I had opened the virtual disk of this VM as a mapped drive on the host machine (TIP: very useful feature to get at files from the VM without powering it up - just right click on the .VMDK file in Windows Explorere, and you'll see a couple of options there to map the disk as a drive). That drive was still mapped when trying to start the VM, meaning that the host machine was accessing the VM's files.

Error in Custom Document Library View

When creating custom document library definitions using the view files output by the SharePoint Solution Generator, you may see the following error on the custom view pages in an instance of the libary:

An error occurred during the processing of ....... Only Content controls are allowed in a content page that contains Content controls.

This is caused by invalid text in the ASPX file - the solution generator adds a comment XML node to the top of each view file, and this needs to be deleted before deploying that view.

Error when a Connected Web Part is Deleted

Caused an error on a development site today by deleting two web parts without first deleting the connection between them. This action seems to have left an orphaned connection within the page source, as the default.aspx page then failed to open, instead showing the following error:

"Cannot find the connection provider web part for..."

To remove the error, it was necessary to open the default.aspx in code view in the SharePoint Designer, and to delete the WebPartPages:SPWebPartConnection element completely.