Crawl fails with an error The SharePoint item being crawled returned an error when requesting data from the web service. ( Error from SharePoint site: Data is Null. This method or property cannot be called on Null values. )

If the Sharepoint Object model is used to add a new group to the GroupCollection of a site and the value passed to Description parameter of the SPGroup is null then this issue will occur.

Sample Code which can cause the problem

-----------------------------------------------------

   using (SPSite oSite = new SPSite(textBox1.Text))
                {
                    using (SPWeb oWeb = oSite.OpenWeb())
                    {
                        SPGroupCollection oGroupColl = oWeb.SiteGroups;
                        SPUser oUser = oWeb.AllUsers["domain\\user"];
                        oGroupColl.Add("Testing Group", oUser, oUser, null);

                    }
                }

Back to the top

Use the Object model to get all the SPGroup whose Description property is set to null and update the value with a string value.

Sample code which will fix the issue

-------------------------------------------

 using (SPSite oSite = new SPSite(textBox1.Text))
                {
                    using (SPWeb oWeb = oSite.OpenWeb())
                    {
                        SPGroupCollection oGroupColl = oWeb.Groups;
                        foreach (SPGroup oGroup in oGroupColl)
                        {
                            if (oGroup.Description == null)
                            {
                                oGroup.Description = "String";
                                oGroup.Update();
                            }
                        }
                    }
                }

Back to the top

If we rerun the crawl again the issue would be resolved.

Back to the top