SharePoint 2007 to 2010 Publishing Sites Database attach upgrade gotchas!

Recently I upgraded a SharePoint 2007 content database to SharePoint 2010 using the database attach method, there were a few gotchas.

1. Navigation not showing – displays – ‘Error’
2. When rerunning a database attach Upgrade it fails with two errors, in the log the error is Exception: ‘Object reference not set to an instance of an object.’
3. Page layout urls still point to the old database

Navigation not showing – displays – ‘Error’

This was an easy one, simply restart the application pool and it should go away.

Unfortunately before I figured this out I thought there had been a problem during the content database upgrade so I deleted the upgrade database and restored the 2007 database tried to rerun the upgrade, at which point I kept getting error number 2.

When rerunning a database attach Upgrade it fails with two errors, in the log the error is Exception: ‘Object reference not set to an instance of an object.’

The was also easily rectified, this happens when you try to rerun an upgrade from within the same command window as previous upgrade, close your powershell window and restart it.

Page layout urls still point to the old database

As part of the upgrade I was moving the site to a new domain, this may also be the case if you are moving a content database to another environment, say your test or development environments.

I had to download the lapontie PowerShell extensions and run the following to remove the wrong url and change it to a relative path.

Get-SPWebApplication "http://<newwebapp>" | Repair-SPPageLayoutUrl -RegexSearchString "(?:http://)" -RegexReplaceString "/"