Saturday, March 17, 2007

Turn on SharePoint error messages

Building application on top of SharePoint would be easier if exceptions thrown from the custom application are shown on the SharePoint error page. By default, SharePoint only shows the generic error message, "Unknown error occured". It does not show the cause of the error and it is difficult to debug the custom application.

Fortunately, found a posting from Shane Perran and Andrew Connell that shows how to give more sense to the errors thrown by modifying the default SharePoint web.config file:

  • Turn the call stack on by searching for the SafeMode element and set CallStack="true".
  • Turn off the SharePoint error pages by turning off custom error pages: search for customErrors tag and set mode="Off".
  • And also, search compilation tag and set debug="true".

No comments: