Author: Andy Burns

Creating a Web Application Times Out

Andy Burns, Leave a comment

I was having a problem creating a new SPWebApplication through Central Admin in SharePoint. It would run for a fair while – longer than I’m used to as this machine seems quite slow – and then I’d be shown the IE ‘timeout’ page within the ‘Create Web App’ iframe. The Web App seemed to have created, including creation of the IIS app pool and site, but they never worked correctly – for example, on different attempts I couldn’t:

  • See the web application’s settings in central admin
  • Create a Site collection
  • Login to a site collection that had created successfully, despite being site collection admin.

Fortunately, I’m not the first person to have seen this. Some folks suggest using PowerShell to provision the web application – which I’m guessing doesn’t suffer IIS timeouts – and others suggest increasing the time outs on the application pool itself. I set:

  • Ping Maximum Response Time
  • Shutdown Time Limit
  • Startup Time Limit

… to 900 (instead of 90), I was able to create and successfully access my new site collection!

Creating a Web Application Times Out

The search provider could not be installed… You might want to try again.

Andy Burns, 5 Comments

So setting up a new machine, I tried adding the Google search provider plugin for IE11; I wanted to add Google as my default provider rather than Bing. However, the Add-On kept failing to install:

The search provider could not be installed.
This might have happened because:

  • A required file could not be downloaded
  • The website is unavailable
  • You are not connected to the internet

You might want to try again later.

Great. The problem was repeatable, and continued after reboot, and reset of IE’s settings. In desperation, I tried change the country that I was in (in the top right)…

Capture

I changed from United States to Turkey and back – and when I tried to add the extension, it installed without problem.

Hardly conclusive, but an interesting result nonetheless. Let me know if it works for anyone else!

The search provider could not be installed… You might want to try again.

401 Unauthorized from a content publishing site

Andy Burns, , Leave a comment

New job, new problem. We’ve a SharePoint 2010 Publishing site using content deployment to push content from an authoring site collection to a live one – and the live site collection started to return an HTTP 401 – Unauthorized to any request for a page.

Continue reading “401 Unauthorized from a content publishing site” →

401 Unauthorized from a content publishing site

Nintex – “This task is currently locked by a running workflow and cannot be edited.”

Andy BurnsLeave a comment

I had this exception start occurring on a workflow I was testing earlier. It was very strange – I’d already run through the workflow step at which this was happening successfully 3 times. Then I started to receive this error, consistently, at the same point of my unchanged workflow each time I ran it.

Continue reading “Nintex – “This task is currently locked by a running workflow and cannot be edited.”” →

Nintex – “This task is currently locked by a running workflow and cannot be edited.”

Making Managed Metadata Navigation work well

Andy Burns, , Leave a comment

In SharePoint 2007 and 2010, if you wanted a neat hierarchy of publishing pages, you had two options. Either, you structured your SharePoint site so that you got the navigation you wanted, or you built custom navigation providers. Unfortunately, customers typically want everything to be ‘out of the box’, even if that means some absurd structures just to get the navigation right. Developing custom navigation providers is a really tough sell, but I’ve also seen site structures 7 levels deep to try to avoid this – and a 7 level deep site structure is a really bad idea.

SharePoint 2013 gives us a standard alternative to structural navigation. Instead, we can use ‘Managed Navigation’. This is a Managed Metadata termset that define’s our site’s hierarchy.

managed-metadata-termset

That’s great, but there are some problems with this still. Continue reading “Making Managed Metadata Navigation work well” →

Making Managed Metadata Navigation work well

File Path Lengths in Windows

Andy Burns, , , 2 Comments

In the Windows API the maximum length for a path is 260 characters.

Slightly edited for length, but that comes from MSDN. Yes, it’s 2014, we’ve dealt with the 8.3 filename limit, found the Higgs Boson, landed a fridge on a comet, but the Windows API still doesn’t play well 260 character length file paths. That’s unfortunate. Continue reading “File Path Lengths in Windows” →

File Path Lengths in Windows