Debugging Errors or Problems with The Portal Connector and Sitefinity

When developing a new portal site, creating forms, customizations, templates, pages or otherwise, you’re bound to come across an issue or two that you will need to figure out. These issues can come from many places, including improper configurations of Portal Connector forms, Dynamics CRM or even Sitefinity.

Debugging Issues

Before contacting The Portal Connector support team, there are a few places you can check to see if you can fix the issue yourself, most of the time the issues are simple and can be fixed without any outside assistance. Listed below are some of the places you can look for the logs, in the order that you should be checking:

1. Portal Connector Error Logs – The Portal Connector error logs contain all logs that come from The Portal Connector and Dynamics CRM. If you are having troubles with form submissions for example, you would look here to get the error logs. The top most part of the error log message would be what you’re looking for, this contains the high-level message that you can use to narrow down the problem. If you cannot find the error in these logs try increasing the Error Verbosity to Developer and then reproducing the problem. To learn how to view these logs read the guide located here.
   
   
2. Sitefinity Error Logs – Sitefinity error logs contain all logs that are caught by the Sitefinity system. Missing views, controls or other system level Sitefinity errors will show up in this file. The logs for these types of errors can be found on the file system of the Sitefinity site under the App_Data\Sitefinity\Logs folder in the file Error.log. This file is appended to each time an error is created so the most recent log would be at the very bottom.
   
   
3. Browser Console Error Logs – Sometimes you have errors that don’t show up in the Sitefinity or Portal Connector error log sections, these may be client-side issues. To check if the page has any client-side errors, open the developer console in your browser. The shortcut to open the developer tools on most browsers is F12, in the console tab of the developer tools you will find all the error log messages (in red)
   
   
4. Windows Event Logs – Windows event logs are usually reserved for checking last. The logs here are usually system level error logs that happen before Sitefinity or The Portal Connector initialize. Most of the time they come directly from IIS. To check these error logs, open the Event Viewer on the system where Sitefinity is hosted and navigate to Windows Logs > Application. The source for these logs will mainly be “ASP.NET …”

Reporting Issues

If you have exhausted all options for checking the common error log locations yourself and haven’t come up with a solution, the next step would be to contact The Portal Connector support team. To save time we recommend attaching any and all relevant error logs or messages from the four sections above, including a detailed description of how to reproduce the problem and also include both your Sitefinity version number and the Portal Connector version number to assist in resolving your problem.

The Portal Connector support email is support@crmportalconnector.com and can be contacted at any time.