SharePoint related content.
I’ve regularly witnessed strange behaviour on one of our SharePoint environments where the ABOUT screen for an installed SharePoint Add-in shows an error message (like the screen-shot below) of ‘Sorry, apps are turned off’ when you first navigate to it after not doing so for a while (10 mins or more). Doing a web browser refresh on the page normally fixes it, but it was annoying so I invested a bit further.
When working with SharePoint list data in Microsoft Excel, it is often necessary to report based on user data (e.g. name, department, job role, etc.) and most of the time this information isn’t immediately available as User fields only store the user’s unique ID and extended metadata is not pulled in from SharePoint automatically.
SharePoint User Profiles provide a wealth of user data, but one of their most used properties is the profile picture. It can often be useful to be able to access this during custom development, and fortunately Microsoft have made it simple to access the profile picture simply via a URL.
There can be many reasons for SharePoint CAML queries not working, but one of the most frustrating ones is “The underlying connection was closed: The connection was closed unexpectedly.” The connection from the client (CSOM/REST API) is just dropped. Debugging the issue can seem, at first, almost impossible as there is nearly no additional data to work with, but sometimes the solution can be fairly straightforward.
If you work with SharePoint custom site templates regularly, and your organisation has separated development, test, and production environments, then you’ll probably have come across the issue where a custom site template you’ve saved in one environment as a solution package (WSP) uploads and activates fine in another environment but then fails with the familiar obscure message and correlation ID when you attempt to create a new site.
Sometimes the easiest way to resolve a missing SharePoint Solution dependency is simply to install it again. Often the solution package (WSP) is available on your development or test environment, but how do you download it from there? For sandboxed solutions, you can just go to the ‘Solutions’ section in Site Settings, but what about farm solutions?!
Whenever SharePoint (SP) is patched tests are run on the farm’s content databases (CDB) to check for issues. In most cases, patching can proceed without adversely affecting the farm but it never hurts to have a perfect and functional an environment as possible before making any changes. This article guides you through how to manually run the same CDB tests, and diagnose and fix any issues/errors that are reported.
Most of the time you shouldn’t need to get involved in anything like this, but upgrades/patches can often queue up one-time timer jobs that don’t get executed for some reason and can hold off other jobs (such as Add-in management) so they don’t run.
Anyone who’s done a reasonable amount of SharePoint administration will probably have come across services appearing to be stuck on a status Starting/Stopping. There can be many reasons for this, and this article aims to look at how to identify the cause and try to rectify it.
The SharePoint Framework (SPFx) is Microsoft’s latest addition to the SharePoint development family. It is custom web-part and page extensions programming model aimed at replacing the over-used (and potentially dangerous) Script Editor Web Part (SEWP) and Content Editor Web Part (CEWP) in SharePoint Online (SPO) and recent versions of on-premise SharePoint too.