NO data displayed in column

This is the most recent issue I came to know from one of my colleague. After moving a single file from source to destination the list went crazy.

Issue:
Column shows no data

Description
There was a requirement to move some files / items from List A to List B. And we used the most recommended way by using content and structure.


Background:

• Source list: List A
• Destination list: List B
• Structure of both the list are same with same column name
• Moved a single item from List A to List B
• From List B opened a moved item
• It showed blank / no data for some of the columns
• Checked old items and found the same thing

Findings:

• Total 3 columns affected Name, Manager’s name and status
• List A and List B both has these 2 columns
• List A contains all of these with “Single line of text” category.
• While List B contains person or group for name and manager’s name and choice category for stats column
• Also in List B found duplication of these columns with different category
• And here is the catch, columns having the same name but with different category showed blank / no data

Resolution:

• To make sure that the affected column shows wrong category, renamed one of the duplicated column
• Found the same column showed up in all three forms (newform, dispform and editform)
• Renamed it back to original one
• Removed them directly from list settings

List or Library shows blank pages

This is very common issue when user closes out list web part on any of the list or library pages

Troubleshooting

• Open faulty page in web part maintenance mode to check is there any web part / script added to that page or not
• Once it’s confirmed go back to faulty page
• Click on Site Action > Edit Page
• Click on Add a Web Part option
• Then from the web part category list navigate to bottom most categories – Closed Web Part
• Select it and it will give you “untitled” (in most cases) in the right pane
• Select and click Add
• That’s all; you will be back in business

Now what in case someone deleted the web part

• No worries open the same page in SharePoint Designer
• Click on Insert and from the data view category choose the option related to your page (New, Edit or Display)
• Add it to the respective page and that’s it.

Feel free to reach me in case of any issues, thanks

Customize Newform.aspx using InfoPath

Last week I was assigned to customize a list page. Here are the steps and some issues I faced during this assignment.

Design / Customization phase:

• Open SharePoint site
• Navigate to List
• Select on the List and then click customize form (it by default shows InfoPath icon)

• This will open the NewForm.aspx page in InfoPath
• Make necessary changes and publish / quick publish it to SharePoint
• By default it publishes to the same list. (to change the default quick publish option we have to dig hard and change some codes inside that form xml. I will discuss on it later)
• That’s it now you have customized InfoPath form loaded to your list

Validation phase:

• Now where to check this is the same customized form you published via InfoPath?
• From Ribbon select Item > New Item

• This should open up a customized form.
• To reconfirm it, open this list in SPD or in explorer view
• Now go to Forms folder and confirm Newfs.aspx page resides there

Known issue / troubleshooting phase:

• I noticed this issue most of the times when we customize list newform it only updated in Ribbon part, in other words it only updates content type filed.
• I faced an issue with add new item option which we generally find below all items

When I clicked on it, I found the old / original newform.aspx page opening.

Use Central Administration to export a site, list, or document library in SharePoint Server 2010

Follow below steps to export a site, list, or document library by using Central Administration

• In Central Administration, on the Home page > Backup and Restore.
• On the Backup and Restore page > Granular Backup > click Export a site or list.
• On the Site or List Export page,
• In the Site Collection section, select the site collection from the Site Collection list, and then select the site from the Site list.
• If you are exporting a list, skip this step, Select the list or document library from the List list.
• In the File Location section,
• In the Filename box, type the UNC path of the shared folder and the file to which you want to export the list or document library.
• The file name must use the .cmp extension.
• If the file already exists and you want to use this file, select the Overwrite existing files check box.
• Otherwise, specify a different file name.
• If you want to export all the security and permissions settings with the list or library, in the Export Full Security section, select the Export full security check box.
• If you want to specify which version of the list or library to export, select one of the following versions from the Export versions list:

• All Versions
• Last Major
• Current Version
• Last Major and Last Minor

• Click Start Export.
• You can view the status of all backup jobs at the top of the Granular Backup Job Status page.
• You can view the status of the current backup job in the Content Export section of the page.
• The status page updates every 30 seconds automatically.
• You can manually update the status details by clicking Refresh. Backup and recovery are Timer service jobs. Therefore, it may take several seconds for the backup to start.

User can still access Allitem.aspx via Mobile site after Lockdown Mode

Issue:
One of my user requested to block Allitems.aspx page to be blocked for internet users and I blocked it using following command
stsadm -o activatefeature -url <site collection url> -filename ViewFormPagesLockDown\feature.xml) it works and user get 401 Unauthorized.
However, when user browse into a mobile page they are able to see all the items in the AllItem.aspx page.
Resolution:

• To turn off site access from mobile device we need to edit the “compat.browser” file for our SharePoint site.
• To find this file, look in your IIS directory for your SharePoint site and look for the App_Browsersfolder.

C:\inetpub\wwwroot\wss\VirtualDirectories\<Site Folder>\App_Browsers
Edit the file as guided in http://blog.drisgill.com/2009/11/sp2010-branding-tip-6-mobile-browsers.html

Access Errors Publishing or Exporting to SharePoint when Attachment File Name is Invalid

Issue:

You receive one of the following errors when you attempt to export a Microsoft Access table to a SharePoint list:

There was an error copying data to a SharePoint list. The Microsoft Access database engine encountered an error while communicating with SharePoint. More detailed information: "

-OR-

There was an error copying data to a SharePoint list. Network I/O error.

You receive the following error when you attempt to publish a Microsoft Access 2010 database to a SharePoint Server:

Publish Failed. Your application has encountered errors while attempting to publish. The publish operation has failed and the target site has not been created.

When you click to view the details for the message, the first error entry is:

"There was an error uploading the data in the tables being created on the server. The Microsoft Access database engine encountered an error while communicating with SharePoint. More detailed information"

Resolution:

1. Open the table in datasheet view in Microsoft Access
2. Open the Attachments window
3. Select the file that contains the invalid characters
4. Click Save As.
5. Save to your desktop
6. Remove the file from the Attachments list
7. Click ok
8. Save the table
9. Rename the file you just exported to your desktop
10. Add the file back to the record

Ref: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2711562

Problem connecting exsisting SharePoint list with Microsoft Office access 2007 database

Error message:

You do not have the necessary permissions to use the ‘<ListName>‘ object. Have your system administrator or the person who created this object establishes the appropriate permissions for you.

Problem description:

When you try to add an existing SharePoint list to a Microsoft Office Access 2007 database then you receive an error message that resembles the following:

Resolution:

·         Checked the number of groups which are present on the site and user permissions on the site as well as for the specific list that we trying to connect

·         User has Full control on the site as well as for the list also so problem is not from SharePoint end

·         Checked the office application installed on the system and found multiple version which consist of office 2003 as well as office 2007

·         Checked the access version and found out it belongs to Office 2007 suite

·         Checked on my machine to reproduced the same and we are able to reproduced it so the problem is not from the Office suite

·         User conveyed that it’s working on one of the SharePoint site and compare both the sites and found out some differences in terms of columns and characters but to make sure did research and found the Microsoft KB

Microsoft KB states that it’s a known issue. Details as follows:

Cause:

This problem occurs because the Access 2007 database engine disallows columns that have names that contain more than 64 characters.

Workaround:

To work around this problem, use only column names that contain less than 64 characters in SharePoint lists.

Resolution for this issue:

There was one column which has more than 64 characters, we shorten the column name and tried connecting the list to access and it works without any issues.

How to reproduce the problem:

·         In a SharePoint Web site, click Lists in the View All Site Content pane.

·         Click Create, and then click Custom List in the Custom Lists column.

·         In the Name box, type Test List, and then click Create.

·         Click Settings, and then click Create Column.

·         In the Column name box, type NewColumnWithColumnHeaderLengthOfMoreThan64Characters1111111111111111111111, and then click OK.

·         Click New, type First Value in the Title box, type Test Value in the NewColumnWithColumnHeaderLengthOfMoreThan64Characters1111111111111111111111 box, and then click OK.

·         Start Access 2007.

·         Click Blank Database in the New Blank Database section, and then click Create.

·         Click the Create tab, click SharePoint Lists, and then click Existing SharePoint List.

·         In the Site Address list, select the Windows SharePoint Services Web site in which you created the Test List, and then click Next.

·         Click to select the check box for the Test List, and then click OK.

Breadcrumbs shows wrong URL

Today I have gone thru a very good example of auto redirection. I was doing some routine exercise on a custom list and converted it to XSLT view in SharePoint Designer to customize it. For safety I took couple of copied of AllItems.aspx page and started customizing default one. For some reason I did not like customization and I deleted the original AllItems.aspx and renamed the copied one.

Issue:

Now when I go to List Settings from browser and click on the list name in bread crumb it redirected me to Web Portal.

(I went to list settings to delete the list, but suddenly I found I was deleting something wrong J) this was more than shocking to me as I missed to make necessary changes.

Resolution:

This was really small and easy change I made, went to SharePoint Designer > Browsed to List > Right Clicked on Properties > Supporting Files > Default view Page.

Make sure it displays “AllItems.aspx” page, in my case it was blank.

Performance issue with Project Task List in SharePoint 2007

Issue:

A Project Task List takes more than 5 minutes to load

Cause & Resolution:

·         User had a project task list

·         Total number of items = 2000+

·         She had created a custom view in which she selected an option Grouped by “Column Name”

·         Created my personal view (of course a standard view, no grouped by, no sort by or no filter)

·         Browsed the list using my personal view and it had hardly taken a minute to open

·         Also found this article - http://kb4sp.wordpress.com/2007/06/25/sharepoint-2007-hard-limitations/ which says – There is not a hard limit, but you might experience list view performance degradation as the number of field types in a list increases to 256 per list.

·         And I also checked when we select Grouped By option in the view Field types in the list increased to more than 300, so removed grouped by option from user’s custom view which loaded the list faster.

How to: Export a Discussion topic List item (SharePoint 2007) to excel or PDF ?

Here is  some tricky way to achieve this GOAL

When you reply to a discussion it changes to Flat view and redirected to flat.aspx page.

So to export discussion topic in excel you have to manually change the URL from flat.aspx to allitems.aspx.

I.e. to enable export to spreadsheet option URL should be http://siteURL/Lists/discussionname/allitems.aspx

Else to export from “Flat view” tries following steps.

·         Open Excel

·         Click on DATA tab

·         Select from Web option

·         Then in URL provide the URL with http://siteURL/Lists/discussionname/flat.aspx

·         This will open a page with Allitems.aspx in pop up and then you can select (arrows) to insert required data to excel.

·         And from Excel you can easily export to PDF

Feel free to reach me in case of any queries / issues related to above post.

Another success story with Export to Spreadsheet Error

Recently I came across very weird issue of “Export to Spreadsheet” in MOSS 2007 list.

Here I am using word "weird"  because I did not find this issue related to IE settings.

When I click on one of the list it says “Cannot connect to the server at this time. Changes to your data cannot be saved” and at the same time my collogues were able to get this working.

Troubleshot the problem from multiple aspects and narrowed down the problem to machines/repro scenario when the SharePoint site had been accessed from Vista/Win7 clients with SSL (https) and with the local user account.
Turned out that the problem was related to certificate revocation lists (CRLs) and had been an issue due to the following setting in IE: "Check for server certificate revocation" which is switched on by-default on Vista/Win7 clients as opposed to XP clients. When this IE switch got turned off, everything was working fine.