Making sense of SharePoint errors

So... all you SharePoint v3 developers out there (WSS v3 / MOSS 2007)... don't you just love when you run into that dreaded SharePoint error "Unknown error occurred" message on the generic yellowish & blue page? It's about as effective as the "Service Engine Soon" light on your car dashboard. Of course, sometimes they get a bit more detailed, but you still get stuck without enough info.

One thing I do on all my development SharePoint sites is to pop open the web.config and make two tweaks so I get the familiar ASP.NET yellow screen of death (YSOD) with the true exception and underlying call stack:

Turn the call stack on by searching for <SafeMode ... CallStack="false" ...> and change it to CallStack="true".
Turn off the SharePoint error pages by turning off custom error pages: change <customErrors mode="On" /> to mode="Off".

Shane posted about this a few weeks back. After a few questions were posted about this, I figured I'd repost it here as well.

Technorati tags: sharepoint, wss, moss, sharepoint error

posted on Thursday, February 01, 2007 9:34 PM

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# re: Making sense of SharePoint errors 2/7/2007 6:44 PM Martin Palmer

Thanks Andrew - thats good stuff!

# re: Making sense of SharePoint errors 2/26/2007 5:03 AM Anders Rask

Dont forget

<compilation batch="true" debug="true">

to enable debugging :-)

# re: Making sense of SharePoint errors 12/3/2007 10:19 AM Tom Kretzmer

This was extremely helpful. Thanks a million!

# re: Making sense of SharePoint errors 3/6/2008 11:49 AM Lucy Hyde-Thomson

spot on thank you had missed the safe mode bit - now I know where my registration user control has gone awry!

# re: Making sense of SharePoint errors 8/25/2008 2:57 PM Dnevarez

I set up Sharepoint 2007 and it has been working fine. Suddenly for no reason I attempt to upload a file and I get an error " Error. Unable to complete this operation. Please contact your administrator."
I am the admin. and I have plenty of space on my "C" drive.
Can anyone help?

# re: Making sense of SharePoint errors 8/27/2008 7:47 AM AC [MVP MOSS]

Dnevarez-
As always, check the ULS logs and Event log for more information.

# re: Making sense of SharePoint errors 3/26/2009 4:40 AM Shams

Hi I am new to sharepoint, so need some help, this <safe Mode > Call Stack... where do i need to go to change it from false to true? and also how do i enable debugging?

I am using Sharepoint 3.0.

Thanks.

# re: Making sense of SharePoint errors 3/26/2009 8:27 AM AC [MVP MOSS]

Shams-
In the web.config of the web app that contains the site collection you are testing.

# re: Making sense of SharePoint errors 6/22/2009 10:17 PM Cameron

Halaluja

This is the most important peice of information for sharepoint development

You should rank this blog under "VERY IMPORTANT INFORMATION"

Thanks for sharing,
Cameron

# re: Making sense of SharePoint errors 11/11/2009 10:06 AM Steve Howlett

Hi Andrew,

I want to get these errors on a live production system where i can not make this change to the web.config - any idea how i can get these errors please?

Thanks,

Steve

# re: Making sense of SharePoint errors 11/14/2009 1:50 PM AC [MVP MOSS]

Steve-
Not possible... this is controlled by the web.config so that's were you need to make your changes.

# re: Making sense of SharePoint errors 12/17/2009 9:44 PM Daniel - SharePoint Administrati

Hi Andrew thanks for this post, I have been getting a number of errors since migrating to a new environment, which I was able to resolve once it was more obvious what the underlying issue was. It ended up being a combination of a number of missing Web Part assembles which I first suspected. In my case, displaying errors was all that was required as the message displayed contained the specific details of the missing assemblies.

I also found the following article which explains how to enable errors, call stack trace, debugging and the ASP.NET tracing feature which may also help when troubleshooting SharePoint errors.

SharePoint: How to Show Full Errors, debug mode

( blog-sharepoint.blogspot.com/.../...show-full.html )

Thanks

Daniel

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