Cannot open page in sharepoint designer. SOAP error.
If you find this post, you are one of the many webpart victims. While playing with a executive dash board, my boss had managed to destroy a page that he had been working on for weeks. Resetting that page to Site Definition did not do the job. Restoring to previous version did not work either.
When opening from SharePoint Designer, he got this error:
soap:ServerServer was unable to process request. —> An unexpected error occurred while opening this page. For assistance, contact your site administrator.
After search the web, I have found a post by Brute Force SharePoint:
http://bruteforcesharepoint.blogspot.com/2009/03/cannot-open-page-in-sharepoint-designer.html
Fixing the problem
To fix the problem you have to delete the webparts from the page one by one until you can open the page again. The rule of thumb is to delete in the order of the most recently added first.
From your browser, go the problem page, append “?contents=1” to the URL.
For example:
http://domain/site/ReportLibrary/problempage.aspx?contents=1
It will give you a list of all web part on the page, you may start deleting until your page can be opened again.
Have fun again, but this time be careful! 🙂