Business Portal 6.0 – Your receive “The webpage can not be found” or a page with empty content

We have received a support case recently from one of the clients that is still working on Business Portal – Requisition Management specifically. The client has almost 20 users working on the requisition management with no reported issues since almost a year.

First Issue Reported

The following case has been reported recently in which the users were not being able to create new requests, upon clicking on the “New Request” button , an error message pops up stating “The webpage can not be found”

The result is:

 

Second Issue Reported

When clicking on the requisition under the employee center, the page comes out with no content, as shown below:

 

Solution

Apparently,there are missing web pages and web parts on the SharePoint level which are causing the issues above. Before explaining how to recover these missing objects, it is important to understand the structure of Business Portal as related to the Employee Center and Requisition Management.

This is the overall structure of the Employee Center, it contains three document libraries within each of them, a minimum of one page.

To check the structure above, open the following URL path:

http://ServerName:Port/BusinessPortalSiteCollectionName/Employee/_layouts/viewlsts.aspx

The problem was primarily due to the fact that the content of the “Requisition Management Pages” document library was mistakenly deleted by a power user.

To recover the missing pages, you need to prepare another identical environment with a “fresh installation” of business portal, from which you can download all these web pages and web parts to be uploaded to the live (corrupted) environment.

Once the “fresh” installation is ready, follow the steps below:

1- On the employee center page, click on “Site Actions” > “View All site content”. This will take you the same screen shot above.

2- Go to the Requisition Management Pages document library (shown above in the screen shot) and you will find two sub pages (Purchase Requests and Purchase Request Details).

3- Repeat the step above for the “Purchase Request” page as well.

4- You still need to download the web parts in each of the pages above to be uploaded as well with the pages. To do so, double click on the selected page (purchase requests) for instance to be opened separately in the browser.

5- On the page (Purchase Requests), choose the “Edit Page” option as shown below

6- Now on the edit page, you will find a box at the right corner of the web part, check this box and then choose to “export” the Web Part

7- Now you can upload these missing pages and associated web parts into your live environment to get everything settled again.

SharePoint |  Important Note !

The name of the page and web part does matter, be careful to rename the web page or web part with the exact same name since SharePoint will be looking for the exact same URL path including the name

For example, if the web page name is (Purchase Requests) with a space in the middle, the SharePoint path for this is  /Purchase%20Requests.aspx   .Because SharePoint simply uses a (%20) to indicate a space in the name.

So if you upload the purchase requests with the name (Purchase_Requests) name, it will not work and you will still be encountering the missing web page error.

Happy News !
I have already uploaded the pages and documents for anyone with a similar case. This is Business Portal 6.0 installation and SharePoint 2010.

You can download them from here >> Download link

 

Best Regards,
Mahmoud M. AlSaadi