Advanced Search web part giving error

Question

I am trying to add an "Advanced Search" web-part to my web-part page. Currently the web part is raising an error object reference is not set to instance of object.

Full stack trace recovered from SharePoint log is shown below:

AdvancedSearchBox class encountered unexpected error: System.NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.
at Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.WebControls.AdvancedSearchBox.GetScopeEnumerator(ScopeInformation & defaultScope)
at Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.WebControls.AdvancedSearchBox.CreateScopeRows(Table parentTable)
at Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.WebControls.AdvancedSearchBox.CreateScopingSectionChildControls(Table parentTable)
at Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.WebControls.AdvancedSearchBox.CreateChildControls(). 813aaaa7-5645-43b5-85ba-e8c67a57997b 03/07/2014 05:40:27.31 w3wp.exe (0x10D8) 0x0BEC SharePoint Server Search Query
dmz8 Unexpected AdvancedSearchBox class encountered unexpected error: System.EventArgs. 813aaaa7-5645-43b5-85ba-e8c67a57997b

Can anyone provide guidance on what I am doing wrong?

What version of SharePoint? Is the web part the only one on the page? — Matthew McDermott, Mar 08 '14 at 14:09
Version SharePoint 2010. And Yes only one webpart on this page. — Jon, Mar 10 '14 at 15:27
The call stack indicates an issue retrieving scopes? Have you deleted all of them by chance? Can you go to the scopes page in the Search Service Application and get results? — CoreyRoth, May 05 '14 at 21:20
Are u matching the correct web application scope in search settings? — Suganeshwari, Jul 18 '16 at 05:25
Have you configured the search service in central admin? If yes, create a new one and try again. — akbar ali, Nov 02 '16 at 13:44

Jason Holtzen · Answer 1 · 2017-08-11T21:32:44.310

It looks like search may not properly be setup on your farm. My first recommendation would be to verify that search works. The easiest way, in my opinion to verify search is to add the search results webpart to a page and verify that I can pass in the search query string to get results.

www.myspsite.com/pages/SearchPageWithResultsWP.aspx?k=SearchTermIKnowShouldWork

Beyond that, I can't help you too much as we have scripts that setup our search automagically.

Edit: The correct way to pass a search string and get good results in SP is not with a ?, but with a #. Also, there is an out of the box way to double-check search. So, to completely test OotB functionality of search, your url would look something like this:

https://my.site/_layouts/15/OSSSearchResults.aspx#SearchTermIKnowShouldWork

Advanced Search web part giving error

1 Answers1