Charfs Blog

There appears to be a bug when working with SharePoint 2007.   When inheriting permission levels from a parent site, you may ultimately ‘break’ any sub-sites beneath the site you are trying to fix.  What will happen is you will get a 500 Internal Server Error when trying to go to the sub-site(unless you specify the /default.aspx or /pages/default.aspx) and you will no longer be able to ‘Edit Permissions’ on the broken sub-site. 

Here are the exact steps to re-produce the issue:

 - On a sub-site under your SharePoint site that has unique permissions from the parent, create a new sub-site.  So at http://SharePointSite/Sub-Site(which has unique permissions from http://SharePointSite), create a new site at http://SharePointSite/Sub-Site/SiteThatWillBreak.

- When creating the new site, select ‘Unique Permission’ and any Template(doesnt matter).

 - Next, setup the new SharePoint Groups for the site(Visitors, Members and Owners).

 - Now at the Sub-Site level, inherit the “permission levels”.  To do so, first goto the Site Settings page of your Sub-Site(http;//SharePointSite/Sub-Site/_layouts/settings.aspx) and then click on the Advanced Permission link beneath the Users and Permissions section.

 - Next, click the ‘Settings’ drop-down, and click on ‘Permission Levels’.

 - Finally, click the button that says ‘Inherit Permission Levels from Parent Web Site’.

Once you have done this, http://SharePointSite/Sub-Site/SiteThatWillBreak will result in a 500 Internal Server error, unless you specify the ‘default.aspx’ in the URL(ex: http://SharePointSite/Sub-Site/SiteThatWillBreak/default.aspx) and you will no longer be able to ‘Edit Permissions’ on the site.  

Here are the Steps to Resolve the Issue: 

From your broken sub-site, go to the ‘/_layouts/role.aspx’ page, then select ‘Edit Permission Levels’

Next, from the same page, click the ‘Inherit Permission Levels’ button. 

Your site should no longer display the 500 Internal Server error nor should you no longer be able to edit permissions.

Hope this helps someone else out there as it took myself and co-worker quite a long while to figure out what had happened and how to resolve.  Of course, any custom permssions on a library or list(or items within those) are completely gone.  But at least you can get to your site and at least re-do permissions.   

This entry was posted on Monday, March 24th, 2008 at 1:33 pm and is filed under SharePoint 2007. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.