Comments on: Incorporating a Master Page into a SharePoint site definition

By: Jay

Jay — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 10:57:35 +0000

Greg, Very good article. Help me a lot in understanding the site definition. But after deploying the solution when I try to create new site collection, it give me error message "Unknown Error". I have doubled checked the procedure you provided and everything is to be exactly the same as per your demo sample.

Please advise on what could go wrong.

Thank you in advance.
Jay

By: Tukaram Thatikonda

Tukaram Thatikonda — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 01:32:35 +0000

My solution compiles but it gives an error when I try to deploy.
:
Install and deploying DemoProject.wsp
Unable to deploy solution
Inner exception(1): Name cannot begin with the ‘%’ character, hexadecimal value 0×25. Line 1, position 2.
:

I followed the exact steps but not able to figure out in the XML file, the character that is causing this error.

Could we have your code for download? So I can compare my xml files with yours and find the character that is causing the error.

By: Adele

Adele — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 14:52:46 +0000

Hi there,
I'm trying to create a team site definition that automatically applies my custom master page, called custom.master. I have created the master page as a Feature (as per Heather Solomon's blog), and I have activated it in my top level site collection. The top level is a Collaboration Portal.

When I try to create a new site based off my team site definition, I get the following error:
Failed to instantiate file "custom.master" from module "CustomMasterPage": Source path "custom.master" not found.

Here are the relevant pieces of my ONET.xml file:

<....>

I have changed my ONET file many times,including trying and this displays the same error as above.

I'm stumped as to how I can get the team site to use the master page from the site collection level, and naturally I'm under heavy time constraints. Can you set me in the right direction?

By: ggalipeau

ggalipeau — Wed, 27 May 2009 22:11:25 +0000

After further review, I found that you are right CyberJP. The siutation in which that ~SiteCollection will work is very limited. I should have used the more generic approach for this article to cut down on confusion.

Change the Onet.xml configuration section to this:

I tried doing something fancy with the ~SiteCollection and it only worked for very specific situations. This is much more general and will tell the path to look at the root level site collection for the master page. Sorry.

I've asked the editor of SharePoint Magazine to change the article for me when he has a chance (because he is the only one who can)

By: ggalipeau

ggalipeau — Wed, 27 May 2009 22:08:50 +0000

The WSP version shouldn't impact the project.
I am not sure why you are getting that error. There was an issue with the walkthrough, which I have asked the editor of SharePointMagazine to fix. Try fixing the error by changing the Configuration section of the Onet.xml to:

However, I am not 100% convinced that will fix your particular error because nobody else has reported that specific error message. And, I couldn't reproduce that message either. So, you might have other issues with your solution. Maybe a step was missed or mistyped. I am not sure. Tell me if the fix above helps. If not, maybe I can look at your code for you.

By: ggalipeau

ggalipeau — Wed, 27 May 2009 22:03:51 +0000

Barak,
I found the issue with the Walkthrough for certain situations. Change the Onet.xml configuration section to this:

I tried doing something fancy with the ~SiteCollection and it only worked for very specific situations. This is much more general and will tell the path to look at the root level site collection for the master page. Sorry.

By: ggalipeau

ggalipeau — Wed, 27 May 2009 21:19:14 +0000

Hi Raghu,
Yes, I just followed the steps on a WSS site and it didn't work. Instead of using ~SiteCollection in the Onet.xml, try this instead:

By: wang

wang — Fri, 15 May 2009 14:15:36 +0000

it display the error: failed to instantiate file “default.master” from module “defaultmasterpage”: source path “default.master” not found when I create the sitecollection in central administration by your method.
the wsp version will impact the project?

By: Raghu

Raghu — Tue, 12 May 2009 02:05:59 +0000

Hi ,
I have a quick question i am unable to get the custom masterpage to pickup does this ~SiteCollection is used in MOSS only or can we use this in WSS 3.0?

Thanking you in anticipation

By: ggalipeau

ggalipeau — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 21:03:36 +0000

Hi Per,
That is a good approach. Remember, think of Site Definitions as “templates”. If you “redeploy” you are just redploying the template. It will not effect the content the users have already started putting into the pages. So, you should have no problem doing this.

By: ggalipeau

ggalipeau — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 20:55:46 +0000

I think you posted this same exact question above in the comments. So, here is the same response

Depends where the master page lives. If the master page lives within the current site you are on, then it is under the relative path “_catalogs”. However, if the master page lives in the master page gallery on a site collection and you are on a subsite, then you have to build a relatvie path that traverses up to the site collection “~SiteCollection/_catalogs”.
The reason I put “~SiteCollection/_catalogs” is because I originally got responses that using “_catalogs” didn't work. When I discussed this with the people who made the comments, I realized that they were only deploying the master page to the master page gallery at the site collection (or root site) level. Then when they created subsites and used “_catalogs” it wasn't finding it because it was looking for it at the subsite gallery instead of the the site collection (or root site) gallery.
So, I changed the post at that time to tell people to use “~SiteCollection/_catalogs”. This seemed to work for those people and it worked in my test environement.
However, since it didn't work for you, then maybe there are specific situations in which this doesn't work. MOSS vs WSS. Publishing vs Non-Publishing. In SharePoint there can be a lot of reasons.
Regardless, if you are doing the straight “_catalogs” way, then just be careful with sub-sites. You have to make sure the feature that deploys the master page to the master page gallery does it at a “Web” level. That will ensure that the master page goes into the gallery at each sub-web. This post says to do it at a “Site” level. And that will only put the master page at the site collection (or root web).

By: ggalipeau

ggalipeau — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 20:54:33 +0000

By: CyberJP

CyberJP — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 03:17:21 +0000

When I try the example, master page does not work with this :

MasterUrl=”~SiteCollection/_catalogs/masterpage/DemoCompany.master”>

but work with this :

MasterUrl=”_catalogs/masterpage/DemoCompany.master”>

Why ?

By: CyberJP

CyberJP — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 00:11:56 +0000

Master page does not work with :
MasterUrl=”~SiteCollection/_catalogs/masterpage/DemoCompany.master”>

but work with :
MasterUrl=”_catalogs/masterpage/DemoCompany.master”>

By: Per

Per — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 18:12:12 +0000

Hi Greg

Thanks for this well explained article. I have one question:
Eventually I will deploy my solution to the production environment and the users will start using it, adding articles etc to the site. If the user then later wants changes to the masterpage, css or other elements in a running site, should I then change the solution an "redeploy" to production (after testing), or should I use another approach.
Thanks in advance
Per

By: ggalipeau

ggalipeau — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 21:42:40 +0000

I am not really sure Chetan, there could be multiple issues. However, I can help you debug. You are just getting “unexpected error”. You need to get a better error message first before you can figure out what is going on. You could sort through your logs for this. Or, you could turn on debugging messages. Please refer to my blog on how to do that: http://greggalipeau.wordpress.com/2008/01/21/de...
That should get you a better message and hopefully you can figure out what the issue is.

By: ggalipeau

ggalipeau — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 21:39:07 +0000

Nope, thats not a typo. I explained it a little more clearly in some of the earlier articles. It is basically saying replace the “MasterUrl” with DemoCompany.master. If you don't do that, then SharePoint will replace the “MasterUrl” with default.master. So, you are not actually replacing default.master, you are just telling SharePoint what the “MasterUrl” is (which is how it knows the master page to use).

By: ggalipeau

ggalipeau — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 21:36:16 +0000

Sorry it took me sol long to get ack to you Barak. I am not getting emails from this site on when people leave comments, so I thought I just wasn't getting any
I am not sure what you problem is. However, one thing that comes to mind is “Are you expecting this to show up on sites that already exist?”
This Site Definition process only works on new sites. For already created sites, you just have to deploy the feature to move the master page to the master page gallery. And, unfortunately, you have to manually choose the master page on the existing site.
I actually built myself a little winform app that recursively loops through the sites and turns this on for me. So, programmatically is anothe choice, as opposed to manually, for already existing sites.
It is unfortunate in the way they designed that. Sorry.
If this is not your situation, then I am not sure why you are having issues. I have worked through this with lots of people and sometimes it comes down to a mistype somewhere or something really small like that.

By: Chetan

Chetan — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 06:09:14 +0000

Good tips on the deployment Greg! Here is a issue I've got: In “development” environment, I have a master page on which there are a couple of web parts incorporated thru the Sharepoint Designer. I move my solution to production and re-activate/de-activate the feature which points to my custom master page and it breaks with the uusual “unexpected error”. I'm wondering, if my assembly has changed, do I have to re-add the webparts thru Sharepoint designer in “development” again and re-deploy? Could it be possible that the webparts have a new ID – but if that was the case my “development” would have errored out too! Any pointers?

By: Barak

Barak — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 01:10:46 +0000

Hi Greg,

Great article!! However, when I followed the article I've got everything right, except that in the default.aspx it was still pointing to default.master and not to DemoCompany.master
I've checked & doubled checked the onet.xml, but it was exacly as you wrote it. Any idea why this is happening?