The dreaded ‘Absolute path information required’ – Some light in the darkness
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.
Appreciate your tool, worked Great. Your a Savior. Thanks a bunch.
Hey! I tried it, but no luck. Isn’t there another cure (other than uninstalling EVERYTHING?)
Thank’s very, very much.
This is a great Tool.
Walter
Your blog is interesting!
Keep up the good work!
Really Informative. Thanks For the great blog.
Thanks a lot, you saved the day.
It worked perfectly.
Awesome tool, you saved my day!
Your solution saved my day and re-build of the our server farm. Hope you have more such interesting tools and articles in this site.
Ciao !!
Unbeleiveable, after all I read I was this close to doing a complete reinstall. Saved me a big headache, Great tool!
Hi Jai.
Your tool worked like a charm on our setup! Thank you!
/M
Thanks a Lot for the awesome tool !! You saved my day
Unbelieveable, why ms doesn’t provide this god knows.
Fantastic, worked like a treat
Thanks
A
Thank you so much for the tool!
Jai, Nice post. Fixed my issue very easily!
This is an absolute time saver as we were just about to rebuild the SharePoint farm. I just cannnot understand why when creating a web application the path doesn’t get checked at that point and prevent you from continuing. Thanks Jai for the good work!!
It’s worked for me.
Thanks jai.
raju.
This was a Hugh savings. Amazing that someone else had to create this tool and MS neither provides a solution nor talks about the problem
nice tool Jai. It worked for me.
Thank You, This tool was like magic, it really solved the issue, it listed all invalid applications on my IIS and SharePoint and i was able to delete them then everything went so fine !!
If I run the application on my server would it display the invalid applications first and give me an option to delete? What should I expect when I run the application on the server? Thanks to all the reply. Does anyone have screenshot of what I will see once the application runs?
THank you. We got our server working again.
Thanks Jai,
This tool is really useful. Every time I ran into this error, I used to create a console app by writing the code all over again.
But your tool is damn good and has a nice UI that makes it very easy to use .
Thanks,
Deepak
Worked great for removing web applications that are messed up. When I tried to manually delete my web app from SCA, I received an error that showed up in the sharepoint logs as: System.NullReferenceException Exception Message: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.
This tool removed it easily and I was able to re-add the web app after.