Form won't open in Sharepoint Designer

Question

I'm using Sharepoint Designer (2010) to develop a series of connected lists.

I have a number of child-lists and I use the "DispForm.aspx" of my main list to add these 'children'.

Recently the DispForm.aspx has stopped opening in Sharepoint Designer. Clicking it from the list's main page goes into the Form view, but the page never loads and I get no error messages.

Since I can't see the Code window I can't make any changes, even though the page works fine in the browser and I can perform edits directly on the website.

Has anyone got any tips on what I could try, or any way of accesing the code in DispForm.aspx if I can't open it in Sharepoint Designer?

Answer 1

If you were previously able to open a page in SPD and are now unable to, one of the main culprits that I have found is the thousands and thousands of lines of whitespace that SPD tends to add whenever doing modifications.

You can fix this by exporting the page in question and opening in a text editor. Depending on the amount of whitespace that was entered, you may want to use something a little more powerful than notepad.exe. I use notepad++ or VS at the moment. I would recommend writing a small program to automate it, which I have not gotten around to doing yet, myself.

Once you have stripped out the erroneous lines you can import it and replace the file online.