SharePoint (and Project Server) Shenanigans

While working on a customers development system I was quite surprised to get the error below while working with a list.

I was creating a custom list and wanted to add a lookup to an existing site list, as soon as I selected the ‘Lookup’ radio button, BANG – SharePoint errored.

Normally when you select Lookup, the Addition Column Settings pane show all the lists available on your site in the Get Information from dropdown.

When we checked the list of lists from All Site Content, a couple of the lists would not open, the <SiteName>/Lists/ListName/AllItems.aspx page was giving a 404 error

It was clear we had a couple of duff lists on our hands, we tried deleting them via SharePoint Designer, Stsadm & PowerShell, none of which would work. I even tried running an stsadm –o databaserepair with the deletecorruption switch, but still no joy.

Finally I decided to take a look in SQL, normally you would never do this, and certainly never on a live system, but as this was development I thought it would be okay.

The first thing to do was run a quick backup just in case !, then break open the database, fortunately all the lists in a contentDB are entries in the table AllLists

So as a starter Select * from dbo.AllLists order by tp_Title

Shows the references to all the lists in your ContentDB in name order

also quite fortunately you can search by list name which is the tp_title field

so was quite easy to track down which lists were the ones in question, all the entries looked okay, so I took the rather brave (so I thought)decision  to simply delete the entries in question as we had a SQL backup to fall back to.

Once deleted, the references to the duff lists disappeared from All Site Content and we could carry on with our  work, albeit now several hours behind schedule.

If this had been a production system it might have needed a call into Microsoft Premier Support, even then I suspect the answer may have been similar.

Happy SharePointing !