I took over a rather large C# .NET 2.0 legacy web application from a colleague who is no longer available. This web application consists out of multiple projects in one solution. And I ran into a problem that I simply do not understand and hopefully somebody here will.
The application has multiple .sitemap files included in a sitemap subfolder. So far so good. But I found one .sitemap file that was floating around in the root of the web project and is not used anywhere in the application (it’s not included in the web.config).
I excluded this file. The web application runs fine without it. All menu’s load correctly. Until I hit a method that uses recursion to look for certain controls (NOT the sitemap!). This method runs down through all controls from a given point and then crashes on the fact that the XMLSitemapProvider is missing this one file. This method is called many times without issues, but when the user logs out it somehow runs through a hierachical path of controls that eventually end up at the missing .sitemap file.
The file also needs to be at this exact location in the root. Moving it somewhere else will cause the same crash.
The file web.sitemap required by XmlSiteMapProvider does not exist.
I have searched for this filename and all “.sitemap” files but can not find it anywhere in the solution. 0 results found. I’ve ran past all the code leading up to the crash and it seems arbitrary (it has nothing to do with the sitemaps). The crash just happens because it hits the XmlSiteMapProvider looking for another control when it’s going through all controls. In short, I can find no references what so ever to this file!
Since this web application is huge I can not manually go past every section of code. There is hundreds of thousands of lines of code. Does anybody know any other way then through the web.config to include a sitemap or how a sitemap file could be registered and where I should look?
Final note: this application used localization. The sitemap’s are localized and I found resources for this one sitemap. I hoped excluding those would solve the problem. Unfortunately it didn’t.
The answer is that when you do not set a default in your webconfig it will look for this filename. Set a default to an actually defined sitemap in your webconfig and the problem goes away…