Discussing the ins and outs of developing for SharePoint and the Microsoft platform

I’ve been spending some time looking at the Forms Based Authentication solution that is part of the CKS – it has some great web parts and management forms for working with forms based authentication in SharePoint – but I did find that there are a couple of things to make sure you do before everything will work for you correctly that I thought I would share here.

When activating the user management feature you get an error about a dependant feature not being installed

When you run the setup script you might find that you get yourself into some trouble when the feature “FBAManagementSelf” tries to activate, complaining that a feature that is a dependency of this one is not installed. Technically this is true, the feature it is looking for isn’t installed and that is because it was cut from the solution. So the fix here is to update the feature.xml file and remove the dependency. Browse to 12\TEMPLATE\FEATURES\FBAManagementSelf in windows explorer and open feature.xml and remove these lines:

<ActivationDependency FeatureId="01AA8D8B-000A-4c35-8F4F-5D1280377650" />
<!--  My Settings Save Override  -->

“Object reference not set to instance of an object” error on FBA User Management page

This one had me stumped for a short while, but wasn’t too hard to figure out. Basically what was happening when I clicked on the link from the site settings page I would keep getting the good old NullReferenceException error message there – after downloading the source code and debugging this it became pretty easy to figure out. Basically what this page is doing by default is showing a list of users in the current site that are forms based authentication users – so if none of your FBA users exist in the user info list in the site, then there will be nothing returned and the exception is thrown.

The fix is easy – go in and grant one of your FBA users permission to the site somewhere. This will add them to the list and then when you browse back to the page you will find the exception is gone and you can see the list now.

Apart from that the install and setup was fine for me, just set up your forms based authentication source just like you would normally, and then install this solution to get all the extra goodies and you are off and running!