Help - My Admin menu has diappeared!

[dadkind]

Hello, I'm hoping someone has run into this and figured this out.

I've been developing my site in a VM running Windows 2003 Server and all works well.

Today, I tried to visit our staging site using my Vista laptop and could not see the admin menu. This happened in both FireFox and IE.

Is suspect that this is a Vista/Security problem, but I'm not sure where to look, or what to set.

Here's an image that shows the missing menu:


Does anyone have an answer/solution?

TIA,
-tomas

[mazhar]

Check your Admin/menu.sitemap file and make sure that its not corrupted. Also it may be due to some roles assignments you imposed mistakenly for the user.

[dadkind]

Check your Admin/menu.sitemap file and make sure that its not corrupted. Also it may be due to some roles assignments you imposed mistakenly for the user.

It looks like it's a Norton AV problem.

My Vista laptop and my XP Pro laptop both have NAV2009.

But my dev box VM (Win2k3 server) has no AntiVirus and it sees the menu just fine in both IE and FF.

I'm guessing that NAV is blocking some sort of script (for some reason).

So I'll have to dig a bit farther.

Fortunately, we're not using these menus on the main part of the site. Just the Admin part.

I'll post any resolution I find.

-tomas

[dadkind]

Check your Admin/menu.sitemap file and make sure that its not corrupted. Also it may be due to some roles assignments you imposed mistakenly for the user.

OK. Things are going downhill fast!

I checked the menu.siteMap file and it seems OK. I only have one user on my dev box, and I've not even started messing with user rights/roles.

I added an "x" (literally) to my AdminHeader.ascx file to give me a visual clue as to where the missing menu should be appearing.

I then hit CTRL-F5 and my AdminMenu disappeared from the browsers on my dev system. So there is something going on with my server (and now my admin menu does not appear on my dev box or my staging server).

There is an exception logged in the event log whenever I try to visit an admin page.Here is the entry:

Exception information:
Exception type: Exception
Exception message: Unable to respond to new url:/ScriptResource.axd?d=ediZHomXADKNuC3q5TR1iyi8uxe6RCul5TIMPJr5swDpG7tO4qYTdS7HXQkh-l1ZCcwTti3WVVGfzCUh40ZwEqgG7gG3hRXdInz0R-m0jlc1&t=633622955780000000<br />Length cannot be less than zero.
Parameter name: length

Has anyone seen this before? My site is now unusable, since I can't get to the admin menus.

Please help!

-tomas

[AbleMods]

Just guessing, but if you added the "X" and the menu disappeared did you try removing the X to see if the menu returned? Obvious I know but seemed worth it to ask.

Do you see the CAPTCHA on the Admin login page on your staging server?

Did you build the VM with all the necessary install requirements like AJAX extensions, web extensions etc?

Alot of people are using Vista, so that's probably not the issue.

Wonder of the ComponentArt Web.UI module is VM-compatible?

[dadkind]

Master Yoda,
The dev box/VM is Win2k3 server. And yes it has all the extensions. I've used this VM for many other projects.

Everything was fine, until about a day ago. I noticed that the Admin menus were no longer visible on the staging server (on Godaddy). Then last night and today, the admin menus disappeared from my dev box.

Oh, I disabled the captcha's on the dev box, but they were working. They are still working on the staging site as well.

I re-installed the ac7.1 package in a sister folder. THAT version shows the Admin menu successfully.

I DIFF'd the two AC folders/trees and the only difference are the custom files that I'd developed. None of which were in the Admin folder.

I even copied the Admin folder from the good/new folder to my real dev folder with no success.

I can think of no reason why one folder would show the menu, but not the other.

Unless, the menu is drawing some info from the DB at runtime?? (But both the working and not-working sites are using the same DB instance).

I'm stumped and things are going to get critical tomorrow. Not good.

-tomas
P.S. And yes, I removed the "X". lol.

Just guessing, but if you added the "X" and the menu disappeared did you try removing the X to see if the menu returned? Obvious I know but seemed worth it to ask.

Do you see the CAPTCHA on the Admin login page on your staging server?

Did you build the VM with all the necessary install requirements like AJAX extensions, web extensions etc?

Alot of people are using Vista, so that's probably not the issue.

Wonder of the ComponentArt Web.UI module is VM-compatible?

[AbleMods]

Very odd. Definitely sounds like something in the customizations has caused the problem.

I believe Able uses a custom sitemap provider. Perhaps you've stepped on it somehow in your customizations and it's blowing the menu-based calls to the sitemap menu file on the Admin side.

Based on your screenshot, I noticed you also are not getting breadcrumbs on the Admin side. This too would be an indicator of a problem with the Able sitemap provider.

[dadkind]

OK. Found the problem.

One of my "customizations" was to allow an all-lower-case url (~/my-product-p123.aspx) to work properly.

But of course, I had a bug in my code.

My solution invovled a UrlRewrite. Unfortunately, I was rewriting some AXD requests as well which was preventing the menu items from being rendered.

I've fixed it, I hope (the menus are working at least!).

Thanks for all your help!

-tomas