Ghosting and Solutions

Ghosting and Solutions header image

Ever spend time trying to figure out why your nice and shiny solution file didn’t return any errors but still isn’t showing the changes you made to your masterpage or pagelayout? Last week i actually spend way to much time doing that, due to the fact that someone uploaded his masterpage to the masterpage gallery, without using the solution; thus wrecking my solution since SharePoint sets a little marker to that page, telling it that its ‘ghosted’. Now without diving into the whole dark ghosted matter, all i would say about that is; it made me sad. Nice solutions that wouldn’t work because of a damn marker. Luckily for me Gary Lapointe made me happy again with his nice stsadm extensions (download).

They provide a nice and clean way to fix the above explained issue (he explains it himself on this post). Short explanation of what it does:

  • you can easily check files for being ghosted / or not
  • you can reset files / sites / web apps to be sure they all use the version that is on the file system, rather then using a ghosted version

The trick i used most a plain and simple: stsadm –o gl-reghostfile -url <http://localhost> –scope WebApplication -force

That will run trough a complete site trying to reset all found files that are ghosted. I did that after a pushed my solutions and as excepted i found myself using the correct master pages, showing my fixes.

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