I just found an interesting “feature” in MOSS publishing infrastructure. We’re designing a custom master page for our MOSS portal solution. If I recall correctly, we started with Heather Solomon’s minimal master page, but I’m not really sure.
We swiped out all of the built-in styles and layouts to achieve maximum flexibility and stylability of MOSS infrastructure. I believe this is the best choice when you have to adapt your portal to custom tailored design layout.
Well, the result was, the portal worked fine with our master page, BUT the content query web part failed. It failed every time we enabled the RSS feed feature. Instead of seeing the actual content, it showed only an error message (in Latvian, since we’re using the latvian language pack) “Šo Web daļu nevar parādīt. Lai novērstu problēmu, atveriet šo Web lapu ar Windows SharePoint Services saderīgā HTML redaktorā, piemēram, Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer. Ja problēma netiek novērsta, sazinieties ar Web servera administratoru.”
No traces could be found in the ULS log nor in the event log of the server. After setting the diagnostic logging of all categories to verbose, finally an exception was written to the logfile:
Error while executing web part: System.Xml.Xsl.XslTransformException: An error occurred during a
call to extension function 'RegisterFeedUrl'. See InnerException for a complete description of the error. --->
System.Web.HttpException: The control collection cannot be modified during DataBind,
Init, Load, PreRender or Unload phases. at System.Web.UI.ControlCollection.Add(Control
child) at Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.WebControls.WebPartRuntime.RegisterFeedUrl(String url, String type)
--- End of inner exception stack trace --- at ....
When looking at the RegisterFeedUrl in .Net Reflector, we found out that the code actually accesses the Header property of the Page object that is being rendered and adds HtmlLink control to the collection. It gave us a hint that probably there is something wrong with the page and header objects. And – yes, we had left out the runat="server" part of the HTML and HEAD tags. So, this is the absolute minimum you must have:
<HTML runat="server">
<HEAD runat="server">
....
.. and, of course, the name space references and other stuff you usually put in the HTML element tag.