HTTP 500 (No authority could be contacted for authentication.) in SharePoint

I was getting an HTTP error 500 after restoring my SharePoint development server in a different network (at home). The thing was a bit curious because I could see the SharePoint site from the virtual server, but not from my physical server and yes, I checked the IPs and they were OK. The first thing I did was to configure the IE9 to show me the HTTP errors the way I like them, the “unfriendly” way.

To do so I went to Tools –> Internet Options –> Advanced, and there in the tree below Browsing I unchecked the “Show friendly HTTP error messages”.

After that I could see that the problem I was having when connecting from outside was “No authority could be contacted for authentication.” Here I saw that the easiest way to fix the problem was to remove the server from the domain and then add it again.

And it worked... Finally…

Hiding List View web parts when they are empty

Today I have been required to hide the List View web parts of the solution when they are empty… Even though I don’t like javascript, it was the obvious way to go so I asked Google and it sent me to this post.

I copied the code to a Content Editor Web Part and it worked more or less, but when I tried to hide the column headers and adding a message instead it was only working for two of my the three listview web parts in the page… After a bit more of googling I changed it to:

<script type="text/javascript">
 function HideEmptyWebParts()
 {
   var itemsfound = new Array;
   var elements = document.getElementsByTagName('*');
   for(var i=0;i<elements.length;i++)
   {
      if(elements[i].className == 'ms-vb')
      {
         itemsfound.push(elements[i]);
      }
   }
  
   for (var i=0;i<itemsfound.length;i++)
   {
       if (itemsfound[i].innerHTML.indexOf("There are no items to show in this view of the")>-1)
       {
                itemsfound[i].parentNode.parentNode.parentNode.parentNode.innerHTML="<div class='ms-vb'>Not enough data to produce a dashboard.</div>";
         
       }
   }
 }

_spBodyOnLoadFunctionNames.push("HideEmptyWebParts")
 
</script>

And after that it worked as expected.