SharePoint 2013 – Bug with Alert Me on a Discussion Item

If you attempt to set an Alert on a specific Discussion Post, like this:

You will end up a yellow screen of death, like this:

This bug appears to be ‘long standing’, and still exists as of the October 2013 Cumulative Update for SharePoint Server.

On the process of setting up the Alert, a process gets the Content Type ID of the Folder.

We start in the Microsoft.SharePoint.SPViewContext.FolderContentTypeId method, executing:

From there, entering GetValueFromUrlOrViewState, we enter:

Within this method, here are the key variable values:

From there, we come back to the Microsoft.SharePoint.SPViewContext.FolderContentTypeId method and further on down, execute:

Where valueFromUrlOrViewState equals the variable “str”.  So you want to generate a new SPContentTypeID object with a hex string and a URL.  This is where things “go wrong”.

We’re calling SPUtility.Hex where chArray has invalid characters (values outside of 0 – 9 and A – F) in it.  The first one that gets hit is the “,” (comma) character.  SPUtility.Hex has no return statement, so it throws a System.ArgumentException.

This particular bug will require Microsoft to resolve it.  I’ve opened a PSS case on it.