We use a 3rd party add in for forms authentication on our extranet("Extranet Collaboration Manager") - this has been working fine for years, but we have one site where it causes me problems.

What I saw a few weeks ago is that, in SP designer, you can choose "site options" and look at the tab "Parameters" - and this application adds some entries there, in additional to the usual ones.  However for some reason, on one site, all entries in Parameters are missing. When I try to add back in the relevant property I get an error stating "the name <mykeyname> is already defined"

using powershell, I can see values in spweb.allproperties - even though they don't show up in the Site Options page of SP Designer.  Some of those properties have names that look corrupted - names like "?;" ; "?r;" ; "?B" ; "xR;" - but I can't delete them. I've tried spweb.allProperties.clear() - but when I do spweb.update() I get the following error:

Exception calling "Update" with "0" argument(s): "Item has already been added. Key in dictionary: '?r;'  Key being added: '?r;'"

I've tried deleting the keys one at a time, but always get the above error. 

Does anyone have any suggestions on a tricky way I can clear out those values?

Thanks

Hi,

SPWeb exposes two ways of interacting with the property bag:
  SPWeb.Properties exposes a Microsoft.SharePoint.Utilities.SPPropertyBag
  SPWeb.AllProperties exposes a System.Collections.Hashtable

 Apparently the AllProperties is meant to replace Properties, but Properties was left in place for backwards compatibility.While entries added to Properties get propagated to AllProperties with a lowercase key, entries added to AllProperties do not get propagated to Properties.

So, if you want to clear the AllProperties, you need to clear the Properties firstly.

Reference:

http://trentacular.com/2009/06/sharepoint-the-wicked-spwebproperties-propertybag/comment-page-1/

http://blog.johnsworkshop.net/letting-the-cat-out-of-the-sppropertybag-with-sharepoint-designer/

http://pbs2010.codeplex.com/

Best Regards,

Eric

When I looked at the spweb.properties collection, it had no values in it.

I wound up modifying the field "metainfo" in the AllWebs table of the associated content database - I know that isn't supported (directly modifying the content database) - but I couldn't find any other way of changing those values.

References:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/officeasia/archive/2010/11/28/db-trick-to-view-binary-if-the-binary-is-really-just-text.aspx

Thanks for your help

Hi,

You can try to use the SharePoint Property Bag solution to set the site properties:

https://pbs2013.codeplex.com/

SharePoint Property Bag offers developers to store configurations settings at different levels of the SharePoint hierarchy outside of the application itself.

Best Regards,

Eric