Cannot create a Search Service Application

Recently I’ve been building out a few SP2010 farms manually using PowerShell so I can control the naming of certain elements like databases, app pools, etc. However, I ran into a situation where I needed to delete my search service (in two separate farms) and start over. At first, I couldn’t cleanly delete the service app. Both the web and PowerShell interfaces would just hang. Some pieces would get removed, and others would not. So this post helped me forcefully remove the service itself.

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/sharepoint2010setup/thread/88f7998f-4a88-4928-ba59-e76d7f6afcdc

This didn’t quite solve my problem though. When I would go to recreate the search service application, PowerShell would hang. I could see that just about everything was finished, but the service app was showing a status of “Error”. The trace logs didn’t help, so I began to dig around in the configuration database. Lo and behold, I found another row in the Objects table that had the same name as what I was trying to use for my recreated search service. I still don’t quite know how this happened… So I made sure I had the proper GUID for the orphaned item, and I used the stsadm –o deleteconfigurationobject command to remove the duplicate. Almost immediately my PowerShell command finished executing and all was well.

Both farms that had this issue had different orphaned items. On one farm, the object for the old service application needed to be deleted. On another farm, the objects for the crawl store and property store databases were the offenders.

Changing Publishing Page Layouts in SharePoint 2010

I had a problem this morning with trying to change the page layout for a publishing page in SP2010. I’m building my own content types and layouts for my company’s public-facing site, but I don’t have the time to build everything from scratch, so I’m using the out-of-the-box site definition. So to make things work the way I want them to, I am changing each site after creation to use my custom page layouts.

My problem is that after configuring the content types on the Pages library and changing the available page layouts for the site, I still could not change the layout on a page that was checked out to me and in edit mode. As it turns out, the Page Layout button on the ribbon is sensitive to the approval state of the available layouts. If there is no published version of a layout, it is technically unavailable. If none of the available layouts have been published, the button is disabled altogether.

This behavior is different than in SP2007, so it thoroughly frustrated me. Hopefully this will be of some help to others.

The SPD Workflow History List Conundrum

I have this project that I’m working on that requires a lot of SPD workflows. Some of them are legitimate workflows, while others do quick actions like sending notifications or updating fields. At some point I realized that the default history list that SPD attaches to all workflows is going to get large pretty quickly.

So being a clever guy, I proceeded to write a small utility that would let me create new history lists and associate them with my workflows. I was okay with losing some of the history that would be displayed with the workflow statuses. Boy, what a bad idea…

I had three problems:
1. I couldn’t change the history list for workflow instances that were currently running. This was annoying, but I figured I’d get a chance to do it at some point when the workflows completed.
2. Any changes to the workflows in SPD changed the history list association back to the default one. Also annoying, but I could deal with it.
3. It completely prevented workflows from running. Yeah, I saved the best one for last.

I’ve given up on making this work. I’ll gladly accept any ideas that someone has on the matter (besides creating and packaging the workflows in Visual Studio). My internet searches have been in vain.