Default View Missing – Incremental Search Crawl Stuck – Solution
Problem: SharePoint incremental crawl stuck at a particular point of time – without changing the crawling status from: “Crawling Incremental”. No progress in search crawl log. No new items were included in the search crawl.
Root cause: Default view files/associations missing in some of the lists and libraries. When crawler crawls those lists and libraries, it just stuck there! I tried browsing those lists and libraries from the “View all Site content” page. Found those libraries were pointing to their settings page, instead of “AllItems.aspx”!
Solution: Create a Default View using PowerShell:
Add-PSSnapin microsoft.sharepoint.powershell -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue
#Array to Hold Result - PSObjects
$ResultsColl = @()
$WebApp = Get-SPWebApplication "https://sharepoint.crescent.com"
#Get All site collections of the Web Application
$SitesColl = $webApp.Sites
#Iterate through each site collection/sub-site
foreach($Site in $SitesColl)
{
foreach($web in $site.AllWebs)
{
foreach($list in $web.lists) #Lable for Processing all lists. Otherwise, we'll get collection modified error
{
if($list.hidden -eq $false)
{
if($list.defaultview -eq $null)
{
write-host $web.URL - List Name: $list.title
$ResultItem = New-Object PSObject
$ResultItem | Add-Member -MemberType NoteProperty -name "WebURL" -value $web.URL
$ResultItem | Add-Member -MemberType NoteProperty -Name "ListName" -value $list.title
#Add the object with property to an Array
$ResultsColl += $ResultItem
}
}
}
$web.dispose()
}
$site.dispose()
}
#Process Each List and Create a View in them
#We need to process each list in this separate section
#Because, modifying any object in the collection will thorw: Collection modified exception
foreach($Result in $ResultsColl)
{
$web = Get-SPWeb $Result.WebURL
$list = $web.Lists[$Result.ListName]
#Create the default view
$BaseView = $list.GetUncustomizedViewByBaseViewId(0); # Standard View
$viewColl = $BaseView.ViewFields.ToStringCollection();
$list.Views.Add("Default", $viewColl, $BaseView.Query, $BaseView.RowLimit, $BaseView.Paged, $true);
$web.dispose();
}
#Export the result Array to CSV file
$ResultsColl | Export-CSV "D:\NoDefaultView.csv" -NoTypeInformation
write-host "Script execution has been Completed!"
The above script creates a default view on a list where its missing. Run the script and initiate a crawl again.
