Records.BulkDeclareItemsAsRecords input string format issues

Recently I was working on some code to bulk declare hundreds of thousands of files in a folder as record and came across an error when calling Microsoft.Office.Policy.Records.BulkDeclareItemsAsRecords() as noted here:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.office.recordsmanagement.recordsrepository.records.bulkdeclareitemsasrecords(v=office.14).aspx

This technet article has very limited documentation and no examples of how to use the class. It states that the first input parameter should be a "A comma delimited string of item IDs." If you do that, you'll get an exception: "input string in incorrect format". This is because you actually need to delimit the string with a | (pipe character).

Here's a snippet of my code that loops through the library and process batches of x number of items at a time:


 SPWeb thisWeb = SPContext.Current.Web;
                            SPFolder thisFolder = thisWeb.GetFolder(gFolderID);
                            SPDocumentLibrary thisLibrary = (SPDocumentLibrary)thisWeb.Lists[thisFolder.ParentListId];

                             // Query to get the unprocessed items in folder.
                              SPQuery query = new SPQuery();
                              query.Folder = thisFolder;
                              SPListItemCollection unprocessedItems = thisLibrary.GetItems(query);
                              string itemStr = "";


                                  // Build the csv string for the bulkdeclare method
                              for (int i = 0; i < unprocessedItems.Count; i++)
                                  {
                                      int itemID = unprocessedItems[i].ID;
                                      itemStr += itemID.ToString() + "|";
                                      iProcessedSoFar++;
                          

                                  //if we are at the batch size, then run the job and reset processed counter and csv string
                                      if (iProcessedSoFar >= iBatchSize)
                                      {
                                          //snip off that last comma
                                          itemStr = itemStr.TrimEnd('|');

                                          Records.BulkDeclareItemsAsRecords(itemStr, thisLibrary);
                                          
                                          itemStr = "";
                                          iProcessedSoFar = 0;

                                      }

                                  }

SharePoint 2010 Error 8313 Dead SearchService.svc

Search is dead on your SP2010 farm.

You see this error in the ULS logs:

CoreResultsWebPart::OnInit: Exception initializing: System.NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object. at Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.WebControls.CoreResultsWebPart.SetPropertiesOnQueryReader() at Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.WebControls.CoreResultsWebPart.OnInit(EventArgs e)

You also see this error in your server application logs:

SharePoint Web Services Round Robin Service Load Balancer Event: EndpointFailure
Process Name: OWSTIMER
Process ID: 7596
AppDomain Name: DefaultDomain

AppDomain ID: 1
Service Application Uri: urn:schemas-microsoft-com:sharepoint:service:2313ae1967844030a54407c13c36d972#authority=urn:uuid:3f2c33a4777749139422ac1249fc9288&authority=https://server:32844/Topology/topology.svc
Active Endpoints: 1
Failed Endpoints:1
Affected Endpoint: http://server:32843/2313ae1967844030a54407c13c36d972/SearchService.svc

You have tried everything that every other blog post, forum answer, KB article has told you to do. You've used your insanely good SharePoint debugging skills, you have rebuilt your search service application (2x) and for some reason this error just won't go away.

I have no idea what causes this, but I know how to fix it.

To know for sure that you are having the same problem as me, find the virtual application in IIS Manager under "SharePoint Web Services" that has the same ID as referenced in BOLD above in the windows application logs. (If you aren't actually doing round robin with this service, it may be on one server and not the other, so check both). See the connection in the pic below to the error above?

Click advanced settings and find the application pool it's running under. Mine was a bunch of crazy letters and numbers, like 71283482842042sdf203402. Go to the application pool under "application pools" and you'll see it is stopped. Am I right so far? Well the problem you are having seems to be an issue with the managed account that app pool is running under not working anymore for some reason. Here's how I fixed it:

1. Logged into AD users/computers and manually reset the password to something I know.
2. Logged into WFE and went back to IIS Manager and reset application pool credentials to use new password.
3. Started app pool and made sure it stayed up
4. Logged into WFE server and ran SharePoint powershell command: Set-SPManagedAccount -Identity domain\searchapppoolAccount -UseExistingPassword
5. Updated the services MMC with this new password and restarted the SharePoint Server Search 14 Service (on all machines in the farm)
6. Now navigate on your WFE server to the URL that I had bolded above and instead of seeing a 503 error, you should now see a nice service WSDL page: http://server:32843/2313ae1967844030a54407c13c36d972/SearchService.svc

No idea what just happened, but it worked. Now, beer.

Error 'CE_OTHER' when trying to convert document to page using the document conversion feature.

I went back and forth, googling my brains out for a day trying to figure out why I couldn't get document conversions working on my '07 MOSS farm. It turns out that I had to run the "Office Document Conversions Launcher Service" and the "Office Document Load Balancer Service" as the Local System account. Nothing else is good enough apparently. When restarting these services be sure to start the load balancer first, but you probably already knew that since you've been googling your brains out all day trying to find the solution to this. Here's the fun you'll find in the logs on the WFE if you're having this problem:



Requesting launcher from load balancer
Executing method on launcher
Trying to get launcher from load balancer
error code CE_OTHER from the document conversions framework in the callback handler
ScheduledItemEventReceiver:ItemUpdating for item '[page name]
Error 'CE_OTHER' when trying to convert document to page using the document conversion feature.
Failed to generate .
Converting the document to a page failed. The converter framework returned the following error: CE_OTHER
CreatePage: DocumentPagificationException when attempting to convert page: Converting the document to a page failed. The converter framework returned the following error: CE_OTHER at at Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.Internal.TransformDoneHandler.Microsoft.SharePoint.ISPConversionProcessor.PostProcess(SPExecutingConversionRequest etr, CreateDCInfo cdti, Boolean& runDefaultPostProcessing) at Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPDocumentTransformDriver.Transform(SPWebApplication wa, ExecutingTransformRequest etr) at Microsoft.SharePoint.SPFile.Convert(Guid ConverterId, String newFileName, String configInfo, String handlerAssembly, String handlerClass, Byte priority, String peopleToAlert, Boolean sendACopy, Boolean synchronous, Guid& workItemId) at Microsoft.SharePoint.Publis

SharePoint Forms Based Authentication on IIS7, Server 2008

Most tutorials available on the internet for setting up DBA on MOSS are specific to IIS6. I just found a quirk with IIS7 that may slow you down. If you are getting

provider: SQL Network Interfaces, error: 26

and you know that your connection string and connectivity between servers is good, then you may need to force IIS7 to see your new membership and role providers by default. From onenote:

For IIS 7 and forms based authentication, you have to go to your site and specify the default provider for membership and roles in IIS after you have made the additions to the web.config that all the tutorials tell you. The first time you click each, you have to let it try the default and then time out, this takes a minute. Once it has timed out, you click "Set Default Provider" in the right hand column and select your provider. You have to do this for both Roles and Users. Prior to doing this make sure both of your providers appear in the Providers feature of IIS.

Type: SchemaValidationException, Exception Message: Schema validation found non-datatype errors.

If you get that error when opening an infopath form after programmatically editing the form, you need to set the PreserveWhitespace property to true:

XmlDocument myDoc = new XmlDocument();
myDoc.PreserveWhitespace = true;
myDoc.Load(myInStream);

helpful post on updating infopath form programmatically

http://www.novolocus.com/2006/08/15/update-infopath-forms-from-within-workflow/

TaskProperties Null in CreateTask activitiy

In a statemachine workflow I was building recently, I made the mistake of assigning my TaskProperties in a CreateTask activity to a new Property instead of a new Field (Bind to a new Member tab). Fields get initialized as SPWorkflowProperties objects with all the properties such as Title and AssignedTo instantiated and ready for you to assign values to them in your invoked event. This is not the case with Properties, the Title and AssignedTo sub props won't be accessible because the prop isn't setup as a strongly typed SPWorkflowProperties object yet. Instead, you get "Object reference not set to an instance of an object" when you try to access title or any other sub props. There you go.