Saturday, April 12, 2008

When Good Web Parts Go Bad


Here's a quick tip for a Saturday morning.

At some point it's bound to happen. You'll mess up a perfectly good SharePoint page by incorrectly configuring a web part. You may add some incorrect custom HTML, JavaScript, or style sheet code to a Content Editor Web Part, and then not be able to edit or close the web part. Or you may add a page viewer web part to frame an external web page and the webmaster controlling that external page writes some code to break it out of frames.

When this happens, you need some way to close the offending web part. To do this, go to the Edit Properties page for the page that contains the bad web part. If you scroll to the bottom of Edit Properties page, you will see a link to Open WebPart Page in maintenance view. Click on this link.

From the Web Part Page Maintenance page, you can select the web part you messed up and then either Close it, Reset it, or Delete it.

Ah! You're back in business!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Closed web parts still run. You actually want to delete these web parts.

Anonymous said...

Another way to get to the Web Part Maintenance Page is to append "?contents=1" to the end of your web part page's URL and loading that page. For example:

/sites/foo.aspx
/sites/foo.aspx?contents=1

That's a good tip though, I like knowing how to get to the page via the SharePoint interface rather than the direct approach via the URL.