SharePoint MOSS 2007 - Style Library - File Not Found
/A client called up - after they performed a site collection export and import (in order to duplicate a site), the Publishing features we developed for them stopped working. The site looks wrong.
So I pull out my detective hat and get to work.
- IE Developer Tools quickly showed that there's a problem getting the CSS files from Style Library, where our feature deploys the CSS files
- Jumping into the Style Library - things look in place. Click on the CSS file itself -> File Not Found
- Times like this one just LOVES SharePoint. The main trap here really is that a whole number of files could be "not found". And that error doesn't actually mean an awful lot.
- Tried the simplest: knowing this file is part of the site definition, I deleted the file and re-activated our package. SharePoint says file is back. But again, clicking on it leads to the File Not Found error, again
- Quick check of the 12 Hive on the Web Front Ends (WFE) quickly determined that the file does exist in \FEATURES\
- Imagining that it may be customized somehow, I tried Reset to Site Definition. Still no good.
- On the edge of going to the log files…
- When I remembered that we can try to see what the real error is. So take a detour to the web.config
- CustomError="Off"
- CallStack="True"
- Ah ha. Site <guid> not found. Stacktrace says Blobcache is involved.
- This actually makes a lot of sense and confirms we weren't just mad. Yes there is a file missing - the cache file! Our file is actually fine sleeping in the content database.
- Confirmed with customer they did switch on Blobcache a few month ago. But obviously it's now interfering with the export/import routine.
- Switched BlobCache off via web.config
- Refresh (F5) the site - everything's running just fine again :-)
All in about 50mins work. In hindsight… jump to the Stack Trace right away to save guess work.
In SharePoint 2010 - errors will be displayed with a Correlation ID, allowing admins to quickly jump to the error stack trace in the log files.