Copy or move page error in MOSS
In this article, I will discuss another common error in MOSS 2007 and why that happens. Mostly developers are facing this error. Or it might be raised due to copy and move pages within site collection.
In MOSS 2007, there is in built capability to copy pages from one location to another location. Let’s say you have a SharePoint site collection and inside that collection there are multiple sub sites. And you want to copy a few pages (any page containing web part like report viewer) from one sub site to another sub site. Probably you want to reduce the development effort for the re-work (i.e. create the web part/layout pages in SharePoint designer add the web part etc).
After you move the pages while visiting the sub sites and click on those pages, you found none of the reports are working and the following error is throwing:
Unable to display this Web Part. To troubleshoot the problem, open this Web page in a Windows SharePoint Services-compatible HTML editor such as Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer. If the problem persists, contact your Web server administrator.
The server returned a non-specific error when trying to get data from the data source. Check the format and content of your query and try again. If the problem persists, contact the server administrator.
The reason behind is that the original connection between the web parts and the data connection object/library has been lost. MOSS is not able to establish or carry forward the data connection by itself. To resolve this issue, you can edit this page in remove the web part and add the original web part once again and reestablish the connection. Also you can create new layout pages and push those required web part in the pages. Either way you can figure out the issue.
Another point regarding data connection in MOSS need to be mentioned here. If you use any document library as a repository to store the data connection between let’s say web part and the SQL server reports, then you need to take a backup of this document library. Because by any mistake, if you delete this document library which is actually containing the connection, then every thing will be lost. In other words if you restore the document library from the recycle bin, still it will not work. Because basic data connection is not able to recover from that restoration operation. You need to use either template with or other backup tool for this.
