From The Field

I wanted to share a tidbit I encountered when working with a client. We were attempting to troubleshoot a V10 Action – specifically, a Create Item action that was working for the person who built it.  Other users that tried to run the Action received an error in the Action Form stating “Object reference not set to an instance of an object”. This error also occurred if the same users tried to access/edit the Action via the Actions Wizard.

Figuring this had to be a permissions issue, we checked the following:

• · Did the user have access to the Actions Library?  Yes, they did.
• · Did the user have access to the individual Action in said library? Yes, they did.
• · Did the user have Add rights on the list the Action was configured to run against?  It shouldn’t be necessary but we looked anyway and they did have rights.
• · The Action itself and the CorasWorks Central View it was attached to were stored in another site collection, so we made doubly-sure they had Read rights there as well.  They did.
• · The list/Action form contained a CorasWorks Toolset Workplace Lookup (WPL); perhaps the user’s didn’t have Read rights on the WPL Provider, but they did.

At this point, I was a little bit stumped and not sure where else the user’s would need permissions.  To be sure, we bumped them up to Site Owners on both the site collection they were working in as well as the site collection where the Central Views and Actions were stored – even that didn’t work.

Then it hit me.

They were using a Global Link to configure the Action; specifically, a Global Link to point to the specific list the Action should create the new item within.  The Global Links are stored in a list that is automatically created when enabling Central Configuration via Central Administration.  Our customer wanted the Central Configuration site to be a secured site for him and other CorasWorks-trained Administrators only.  His general users did not have Read rights to the Central Configuration site; as such, they weren’t able to read the Global Links list found within.

In the end it was a perfectly reasonable, and soon to be common, configuration – it just wasn’t part of my usual permissions check when something didn’t work.  So, lesson learned: if you see that error when trying to run an Action but the user has sufficient rights (in our case, Admin rights) on everything you think to check, don’t forget to look at the Global Links themselves and if the user has access to those!