Cannot modify SharePoint list views with tracing enabled

26. September 2011 Bart X. Tubalinal .NET , SharePoint Comments (1)

I was debugging an issue with a heavily customized SharePoint site where users were unable to save any changes they made to SharePoint list views. Since this was a heavily customized site with several custom list definitions, my initial thought was that we may have botched a list definition or two and made these lists and list views non-modifiable. However, I also tested creating an out of the box SharePoint List and found out that its views were not modifiable as well. In order to isolate the issue, I created a second web application with a simple Team Site site collection. In this web app/site collection, the list views were all modifiable so I knew that the issue was definitely related to something in our particular web application.

The next thing I did was check the ULS logs. In the ULS logs, I noticed the following entries immediately posted after attempting to modify a list view:

09/26/2011 10:39:40.52     w3wp.exe (0x1790)                           0x0EB8    SharePoint Foundation             Monitoring                        nasq    Medium      Entering monitored scope (Request (POST:http://test-sp:80/_vti_bin/owssvr.dll?CS=65001))     
09/26/2011 10:39:40.52     w3wp.exe (0x1790)                           0x0EB8    SharePoint Foundation             Logging Correlation Data          xmnv    Medium      Name=Request (POST:http://test-sp:80/_vti_bin/owssvr.dll?CS=65001)    9446a0f0-1577-472e-a8af-a552b1b4cc39
09/26/2011 10:39:40.60     w3wp.exe (0x1790)                           0x173C    SharePoint Foundation             General                           af71    Medium      HTTP Request method: POST    9446a0f0-1577-472e-a8af-a552b1b4cc39
09/26/2011 10:39:40.60     w3wp.exe (0x1790)                           0x173C    SharePoint Foundation             General                           af75    Medium      Overridden HTTP request method: POST    9446a0f0-1577-472e-a8af-a552b1b4cc39
09/26/2011 10:39:40.60     w3wp.exe (0x1790)                           0x173C    SharePoint Foundation             General                           af74    Medium      HTTP request URL: /_vti_bin/owssvr.dll?CS=65001    9446a0f0-1577-472e-a8af-a552b1b4cc39
09/26/2011 10:39:40.69     w3wp.exe (0x1790)                           0x173C    SharePoint Foundation             General                           b9y3    High        Failed to open the file 'C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\Resources\wss.en-US.resx'.    9446a0f0-1577-472e-a8af-a552b1b4cc39
09/26/2011 10:39:40.69     w3wp.exe (0x1790)                           0x173C    SharePoint Foundation             General                           b9y4    High        #20015: Cannot open "": no such file or folder.    9446a0f0-1577-472e-a8af-a552b1b4cc39
09/26/2011 10:39:40.69     w3wp.exe (0x1790)                           0x173C    SharePoint Foundation             General                           b9y4    High        (#2: Cannot open "": no such file or folder.)    9446a0f0-1577-472e-a8af-a552b1b4cc39
09/26/2011 10:39:40.69     w3wp.exe (0x1790)                           0x173C    SharePoint Foundation             General                           b9y9    High        Failed to read resource file "C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\Resources\wss.en-US.resx" from feature id "(null)".    9446a0f0-1577-472e-a8af-a552b1b4cc39
09/26/2011 10:39:40.69     w3wp.exe (0x1790)                           0x173C    SharePoint Foundation             General                           8e26    Medium      Failed to open the language resource keyfile wss.    9446a0f0-1577-472e-a8af-a552b1b4cc39
09/26/2011 10:39:40.69     w3wp.exe (0x1790)                           0x173C    SharePoint Foundation             General                           b9y3    High        Failed to open the file 'C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\Resources\wss.resx'.    9446a0f0-1577-472e-a8af-a552b1b4cc39
09/26/2011 10:39:40.69     w3wp.exe (0x1790)                           0x173C    SharePoint Foundation             General                           b9y4    High        #20015: Cannot open "": no such file or folder.    9446a0f0-1577-472e-a8af-a552b1b4cc39
09/26/2011 10:39:40.69     w3wp.exe (0x1790)                           0x173C    SharePoint Foundation             General                           b9y4    High        (#2: Cannot open "": no such file or folder.)    9446a0f0-1577-472e-a8af-a552b1b4cc39
09/26/2011 10:39:40.69     w3wp.exe (0x1790)                           0x173C    SharePoint Foundation             General                           b9y9    High        Failed to read resource file "C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\Resources\wss.resx" from feature id "(null)".    9446a0f0-1577-472e-a8af-a552b1b4cc39
09/26/2011 10:39:40.69     w3wp.exe (0x1790)                           0x173C    SharePoint Foundation             General                           8e26    Medium      Failed to open the language resource keyfile wss.    9446a0f0-1577-472e-a8af-a552b1b4cc39
09/26/2011 10:39:40.69     w3wp.exe (0x1790)                           0x173C    SharePoint Foundation             General                           8l3c    Medium      Localized resource for token 'multipages_direction_dir_value%>' could not be found for file with path: "(unavailable)".    9446a0f0-1577-472e-a8af-a552b1b4cc39
09/26/2011 10:39:40.73     w3wp.exe (0x1790)                           0x0EB8    SharePoint Foundation             Monitoring                        b4ly    Medium      Leaving Monitored Scope (Request (POST:http://test-sp:80/_vti_bin/owssvr.dll?CS=65001)). Execution Time=206.33069286739    9446a0f0-1577-472e-a8af-a552b1b4cc39

The key errors I noticed were the fact that, for some reason, certain resource (.resx) files couldn’t be loaded. These errors were quite strange. First, I wasn’t sure why these resource files were being loaded in the first place. Second, I could not understand why SharePoint was trying to load the files from C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\Resources\. These resource files don’t reside there; they are located under the application’s App_GlobalResources directory. But even manually placing the correct resource files in the Resources directory where the application was attempting to load from didn’t resolve the issue.

A little bit of research led me to a post by Ivan Neganov entitled ‘Writing Trace Output to ULS Log in SharePoint 2010’. In the post, Ivan describes a little caveat that enabling ASP.NET tracing caused some SharePoint instability, namely the inability to create a new web part page and the inability to open up a SharePoint site with tracing enabled with SharePoint Designer. Taking that clue, I removed the system.web/tracing element from our application’s web.config and, sure enough, that resolved the issue.

So there seems to be a little laundry of things broken by ASP.NET tracing in SharePoint 2010. Have any of you had any other issues you’ve encountered?