Find That Missing Web Part

Have you ever “lost” a Web Part on a SharePoint page? That happened to me (again) today. I tried and tried to figure out why I wasn’t seeing the contents of the Web Part. I knew it had some, and I knew what it should look like.

Where's my content?I’ve been bitten by this before, so I figured I’d write a note here to my future self in the hopes that I’m smart enough to search for “missing Web Part” and find this post. Of course, this bites me infrequently, so I never remember that it happened to me before. It’s gotten me in every version of SharePoint, too, I’ll bet.

It turns out that I had accidentally clicked on the Minimize option in the Web Part settings dropdown:

Minimize Web Part

You can set this back from the same dropdown menu, where Minimize will have been replace with Restore. You can also fix it in the Web Part Tool Pane.

Chrome State

It can actually be worse, though. There’s another place that you can do yourself in that’s even harder to spot. (I hit myself with this as a double whammy today.)

Right below the Chrome State above is the Chrome Type. The options there are generally “Default”, “None”, “Title and Border”, “Title Only”, and “Border Only”. If, like I did today, you accidentally select the “None” option, then your Web Part disappears altogether! With the branding I have on the site I’m working with today, the Web Part simply collapsed to a blue line.

Where's my Web Part?

At least I could tell it was there, but since it was a Content Search Web Part and I was working on the Display Templates, I assumed it was my code that was breaking it.

Live and learn, I guess. And always try to write future you a note so that you can fix it more easily the next time.

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5 Comments

  1. I am very surprised to hear that your Web Part disappears when you select chrome none (which is supposed to remove the title and border, not affect the content itself). Could it be an issue with your custom look?

  2. Adding “?contents=1” to the URL after the page extension (aspx) gives you a list of all the web parts on the page. You can do some maintenance there as well, but it gets tricky when you’ve got several web parts with the same name.

  3. I wish you had written this a few weeks ago. I was bitten by this combination as we were preparing to demonstrate a page. I decided to make one last change. Fortunately, my coworker asked if I might have set something to make it disappear.

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