.NET Questions

Hi everyone,

this problem is very specific, involved and not a general .NET problem. However, I know that this forum is frequented by lots of smart people so I'll just post my question here regardless, on the off-chance that some SharePoint/BDC guru hopefully lurking around here has a vague idea how to approach this problem; I'm at my wit's end.

First things first, this problem occurs on our client's (English) MOSS system, but not on my (German) development MOSS system where the solution works fine. For some reason I don't think that the problem is related to the locale, though. The other difference is that on the development system, the SQL Server 2005 Developer Edition being used is running on the same machine, whereas at the client's end, the SQL Server 2005 Standard Edition being used resides on a different machine than MOSS does.

The components involved are the BDC feature, the ADF file and the Business Data List WebPart.

The ADF is pretty basic: one Entity, two Methods (GetX and GetXSpecificFinder), no Associations, two Actions (with one being the default action), and a couple of Filters (mostly Wildcard filters, one or two Comparison filters).

Let me stress that all this works fine and as expected on one machine but not on the other. The problem is that the Business Data List WebPart (no matter what kind of WebPart Page or Site it is added to), when connected properly to the Entity, sometimes produces the following JavaScript alert box: "An unhandled exception has occurred:Object reference not set to an instance of an object."

Circumstances producing the message:
Sometimes in "Edit" mode, always in "View" mode of the hosting page but in both cases ONLY if all of the following conditions apply:
- filters are defined in the ADF (causing the WebPart to display its filters toolbar)
- EITHER the WebPart's View setting is "Retrieve all items" OR any one of the filters is being invoked (by the user or the View setting)
---regardless of whether a result set / data set is being returned by the BDC or not.

The alert box itself:
This is a JavaScript "function OnError(message, context)" that is part of the final output of the page (but, telling from a quick web search, seems to be part of an ASP.NET, rather than SharePoint, feature).

Any hints would be greatly appreciated...
Thanks, Phil

Solved. For everyone with the same problem landing here later: the Business Data List, for some reason, need a SharePoint search field. Hotfixing the local Coveo installation resolved this problem at our end.

Wow, this is just incredible. Had the same problem here. Added a Sharepoint search box and set the property to hidden (We really don't need to show it.) and Voila!

It would be interesting to know why this fixes the problem, and what really causes it to happen. How you managed to find out that you had to add the search-box really puzzles me...

Thanks