SharePoint 2013 User Profile doesn’t support two HTML Properties
Hello SharePointers,
This week I had to fix a strange Issue with the User Profile in SharePoint 2013. Here is the behavior:
I had a User Profile with two HTML properties: “About Me” which is OOTB, and another custom one, let’s call it “Test HTML”. Now, every time I went to the MySite of the User, everything worked fine! However, when I went to the User Profile of the user, it was empty! Here are some illustrations:
MySite:
User Profile:
So, as you see every time I saved something in a HTML Field, I could see it in the MySite, but the property magically disappeared from the User Profile! As any good SharePoint Admin would do, I fired up ULSViewer and checked out the ULS Logs… and here is what I found: Everytime I clicked the “Save” Button on the User Profile Page, I had this unexpected error:
And for the sake of indexing:
ProfileUI: Unhandled exception inside Save_Click: System.Threading.ThreadAbortException: Thread was being aborted. at System.Threading.Thread.AbortInternal() at System.Threading.Thread.Abort(Object stateInfo) at System.Web.HttpResponse.AbortCurrentThread() at Microsoft.SharePoint.Utilities.SPUtility.Redirect(String url, SPRedirectFlags flags, HttpContext context, String queryString) at Microsoft.SharePoint.Portal.WebControls.ProfileUI.Save_Click()
I searched Google and nothing. I wasn’t sure if I messed up the farm installation, or if I messed up the UserProfile but I debugged more and found out something really strange. Even if the AboutMe field was empty in the user Profile, when you looked at the Source of the code, there was something! (I changed it to “Why did About Me Dissapear”). In the picture you clearly see that even if the box is empty, the actual value is in the source.
But then I asked myself… how come no one else found out about this before… is no one using MySites in SharePoint 2013? Then, while deleting customization one by one and testing, I found out I had this “error” only when I had more than one HTML Property. As soon as you delete it everything goes back to normal and you see the same things in both the MySite and the UserProfile.
Now I knew the error, I tried searching Google again (but better) and found a thread on the O365 Community talking about the Same Bug but in SharePoint Online. The Thread recently closed on August 14th, with the final answer:
“SharePoint Online team confirms this is a bug and will work to fix this functionality in a future release, in the meantime, please only edit one HTML property at a time.”
I got this bug with SharePoint 2013 using the March 2013 Public Update as well as the August 2013 Cumulative Update. Moral of the Blog Post… Only use 1 HTML Property for now… at least until the October CU Arrives!