Jai’s Sharepoint blog

I am one of the unfortunate ones who happened to come across the ‘Absolute path information required’ three times. First it happened when I was playing around with MOSS first time. Secondly, it happened after I had gone live and third after I had deployed quite a handful of sites.

Problem: After you created a new web application (and gave a wrong path for the IIS virtual directory), anything you do on the Central Admin -> Application Management would throw a ‘Absolute path information required’. Strangely Microsoft has not released any tool kit / fixes for this yet.

Fix(?): This happens because of an invalid entry created in the Config database and this affects any operation on the Web Applications list. However, this doesn’t create any problems on the current sites, though you cannot touch them. After enough ‘googling’, the following solutions were seen:

1. Re-install the whole server farm!!!!! – phew! a nightmare and last thing you want after your deployment

2. Restore the last working Config database – reasonable, but then you don’t want to mess up with the configuration.

3. Use the SharePoint object model, do some digging and remove the invalid application from the database. After two experiences, this is what I did for the third time and it worked like magic!

I am putting up the same here. Anybody who is in this situation now can download this and try. My application is quite simple and hence doesn’t have any readme! I have also put the source in case you want to customize it.

Executable: SharePointTools.zip

Source: SharePointToolsSrc.zip

To Run:

You need to copy the executable to the server. This application currently cannot retrieve details using a path.

To modify the code:

Install the SharePoint Server 2007 SDK and open the source in VS 2005.

Thanks to Soumyan for this idea.

Note:

I don’t claim this to work for anybody and everybody . It worked for me, if it can help you, it would be great! Take a backup of your existing setup before you try this, please. This piece of software is given as, is without any warranties.