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EPiServer 7 Connect for SharePoint – Known Limitations and Troubleshooting

This technical note contains the known limitations for EPiServer 7 Connect for SharePoint.

Known Issues and Limitations 

  • Page updates with the Push to CMS functionality are available only with EPiServer 7 Patch 1.
  • The Files Search functionality is currently not supported by the Virtual Path Provider for SharePoint.
  • Each item exported from SharePoint will get the same identity (GUID) in EPiServer that it has in SharePoint. A consequence of this is that you cannot have a one to many mapping from SharePoint to EPiServer. That is, you cannot map one item from SharePoint to multiple items in EPiServer, for instance by configuring a SharePoint item in several Content Channels with different roots on the same EPiServer site.
  • It is not possible to copy files between two WSS Providers.
  • If a library in SharePoint has a column of unsupported items of the data type ('Lookup' or 'Person'), then the item metadata will be not updated.
  • Files with a size greater than 250 KB may lead to a long response time (>2 sec), under heavy load.
  • Upgrade of the SharePoint solution is not supported. The only way is to uninstall an old version and install new one. The WebParts need to be re-registered in the gallery and then removed and added back to the pages where it was used.

Troubleshooting

Items are created or edited in SharePoint but nothing appears in EPiServer CMS

When items are created, edited or deleted in SharePoint, the connector is notified of these changes via a background event. Any errors that occur sending the changes to EPiServer CMS cannot be reported to the user directly, as this component has no way of interacting with the SharePoint GUI. Because of this limitation, all errors are written to the log. 

To verify the channel configuration, open the channel settings on the SharePoint site and click the Test connection button.

The most likely errors relating to SharePoint items not appearing in EPiServer CMS are:

  • The EPiServer URL in the channel is not pointing to an EPiServer CMS Content Channel web service. 
  • The EPiServer User name or Password in the channel is invalid on the EPiServer CMS machine. 
  • The EPiServer User does not have the "Permission to act as a web service user". 
  • No valid license for Connect for SharePoint is present on the target CMS site root folder.
  • No EPiServer.VirtualPathWssProvider.dll file is present on the target CMS site bin\ folder.
  • No SharePoint list items or document libraries have been selected in the channel.
  • No page type has been selected in the Content Channel in EPiServer.
  • No mapping has been made between a field on the SharePoint list item and the EPiServer PageName property, for the selected page type in the Content Channel in EPiServer
  • A library or a list is already exported to the CMS using another Content Channel. List and Library items in SharePoint as well as Pages and Files in EPiServer CMS have unique IDs. So it is not possible to export the same SharePoint item to more than one target location/folder in the CMS. 

Enable logging for the SharePoint solution

Connect for SharePoint uses log4net for logging. Do the following to enable logging:

  1. Copy EPiServerLog.config from your EPiServer CMS site root folder to the SharePoint site root folder: C:\inetpub\wwwroot\wss\VirtualDirectories\80 (where 80 is the web applications port number).
  2. Check if SharePoint application pool identity has a write acces to the site root folder.
  3. Now, in case of errors, you should be able to find a log file EPiServerErrors.log in the SharePoint sites \App_Data folder

You can also use DebugView instad of logging to a file:

  1. Enable  outputDebugStringAppender by uncommenting it in the EPiServerLog.config.
  2. Run DebugView in order to see events written to the log. 
  3. In the DebugView, enable Capture Global Win32 in the Capture menu.

Document last saved: February 27, 2013