• KB939308
• Clear the SharePoint Configuration Cache for Timer Job and PSCONFIG errors
• Clearing the SharePoint configuration cache

Clearing the cache, means deleting all the XML files. But what if you delete the entire directory? Well, it gets messy.. SharePoint TimerJobs just stop working all together. And to top it off, you get these nice error messages:

SPTimerStore.InitializeTimer: SPConfigurationDatabase.RefreshCache returned SPConstants.InvalidRowVersion 
The timer service could not initialize its configuration, please check the configuration database.  Will retry later.

Great! :p

So what happened? The directory in question is: C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Microsoft\SharePoint\Config\<guid>\. So the name of the directory is some kind of identifier. Looks pretty innocent, huh..  it isn’t!
When this happened to me earlier on today, I wasn’t really feeling at ease. The timerjobs didn’t want to run, and no one seemed to know what this guid was. After a few hours of reverse engineering however, I found discovered this was actually the config DB ID. Nice! But where can I find it? Luckily it was not hard to find out. You’ll have to open up the registry and go to: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Shared Tools\Web Server Extensions\12.0\Secure\ConfigDB. 

The config DB registry key.

In this key, you’ll find the config DB id. Now all you have to do, is create a directory with this guid and restart the SharePoint Timer service. And you’ll see your XML files reappearing, and soon after your timerjobs restarting. Phuw, that was a close one..

’till next time!

For a couple of weeks now, I’ve got some reports about crashing datasheet views when using custom master pages. As a reminder, the datasheet view is a view you can select when browsing within a list. It’ll enable you to view and edit the list in an excell-like format. Quite handy for bulk changes.

So, what is happening? I noticed the page was going into an infinite loop. When debugging I stumbled upon the GC-functions. Those functions are located in core.js and control the resizing of the datasheet view control. After carefull reviewing, I noticed the document.documentElement.scrollHeight was growing and growing. It seemed that my custom master page let the scroll height go out of it bounds.

To fix this, I simply bound the scroll height to the client height. To accomplish this, you look for

var lGCWindowHeight=document.documentElement.scrollHeight;

in core.js and replace it with

var lGCWindowHeight=(document.documentElement.scrollHeight>document.documentElement.clientHeight) ? document.documentElement.clientHeight : document.documentElement.scrollHeight;

This seemed to solve the problem and stopped the browser from crashing.

But why was this happenning? My best bet is the use of a specific doctype in my masterpage. In quirks mode, IE includes top and bottom borders and padding widths when calculating the offsetheight. Standard mode only defines the content height as offsetheight. I’m guessing core.js relies on the extra margins. Now, the strange thing is, the custom master pages of MOSS (BlueBand, OrangeSingleLevel, …) do not experience this bug, altough they also use a specific doctype. I didn’t really investigate into it too much, but I suspect they restrict the height of some container surrounding the main content. This could stop the growth of offsetheight. If anyone of you, readers, can confirm this behaviour, feel free to respond in the comments.

In the meantime.. have fun branding!

Update: according to reader Rufino, you can also revert this behaviour by specifying a height. Didn’t test it yet, but I’m pretty sure this ‘ll do the trick too. Thanks Rufino!

Hey guys,

Maybe some of you already noticed, the layout of the blog got a small summer update. I never was quite happy on how the typography turned out to be. So I decided to change and go back to the good old Verdana. Hope you guys like it.

While I was at it, I also made the site compatible with Firefox 2 and Safari (FF3 & IE8, I still have to check). So, all you iPhone users can now enjoy a bugfree layout. Talking about the iPhone, I strongly suggest getting WordPress app which was released today. It lets you compose wordpress blogposts in an easy manner right from your iPhone.

WordPress on iPhone

Later on, I’ll release a new article in the branding issues series. Bye now.