Recently I ran into an issue with Sitecore’s Page Editor where the entire header section was throwing a null reference exception. Now that makes it hard to do pretty much anything in Page Editor. When I dug into the issue, this was the error being thrown:

This clue lead me to the Sitecore.Client.dll and straight to the GetHeader function where the actual query for the locked items was being called:

Now when I looked further into the ShowNumberOfLockedItemsOnButton property, I noticed that it, by default, returned true. When I went and looked in my web.config and patch configs, the Sitecore setting wasn’t there! So to prevent the query from running I added the setting to my web.config (or if you wanted to abstract it and keep you web.config cleaner, you could create a Sitecore patch config file for it).

<sitecore>
   <settings>
      <setting name="WebEdit.ShowNumberOfLockedItemsOnButton" value="false" />
   </settings>
</sitecore>

Once I added that Sitecore setting, the error no longer appeared and Page Editor returned to its normal functionality. Happy Coding!

Tags: Sitecore,.NET,C#