Well like every other SharePoint lover out there I always used to admire SharePoint for its cool features and for also being the best Enterprise Content Management platform ever for the business .However, there are certain features which really sound so cool when we read about it but they really fail to excite us when we work on it .So one among such feature is the “Minimal Download Strategy feature “ and this post is about the issues which you would face when you have this feature activated on your SharePoint site .
Now, if you’re someone who hears about this feature for the first time, here’s my link to an article on Minimal Download strategy which was published on my site couple of days back.
I’ve indeed read couple of articles which speaks about the issues with MDS but this was the first time I ever happened to experience one .Alright now let’s take a look at this ….
To activate MDS in your site:
Go to Site settings–>Manage site features –> Activate Minimal download Strategy.
To repro the error:
Go to a document library in a team site which has the MDS feature activated ( remember this feature will be activated by default in a SharePoint Team site ) and try to delete a document from a document library by clicking on the “ellipsis” –>“ Delete document “ BUTTON , you will see an error as shown below without any correlation ID . However, the document would still get deleted from the document library.
Now, this error is not because of any bad configuration in your SharePoint Farm or due to any feature dependency for the MDS feature to work seamlessly .This seems to be a problem with the product itself and looks like this hasn’t been fixed it.
Troubleshooting steps and Fix:
I tried to capture the uls logs by turning on verbose logging but it didn’t find any valuable information pertaining to this error. After researching about this in the internet this seems to be a problem with the MDS feature itself that came up in SharePoint 2013.
Fix:
- This error doesn’t show up when you try to delete the document using the “delete document” button in the top ribbon interface which is really weird .I have no idea how this is different from the former option which we tried .
2. Also if you try to by-pass your load balancer by changing the host file of your PC to point a specific WFE, this error won’t show up.
Now, given these scenarios I try to dig a bit deeper about this issue by capturing the fiddler logs as suggested in this blog article and it turns out that the problem is with the response headers. The below mentioned article can give a deeper insight on how to get this fixed.
https://finarne.wordpress.com/2014/12/10/sharepoint-2013-error-after-creating-a-view/
Other errors related to this feature:
Upon reading couple of other blogs it looks like turning on the MDS feature will introduce few more issues like the “1.Connect to outlook button” not working and “2. “Not able to create a list view “
http://corypeters.net/2013/08/issues-with-minimal-download-strategy/
The above mentioned article was published quite a while back and hence I’m not sure whether the content discussed on that article is still valid.
However ,in my tests I was able to successfully make use of the “Connect to outlook button “ and it didn’t create any problem .I’m yet to try creating a new list view and see if that works and will let you know about that once I’m done testing .
Happy SharePointing!!!! Thanks for reading this post …..
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