How to solve error with comments paging on blog site?

Question

We have a news functionality in SP2013 based on the blog site template. The problem occurs when a post receives more than 10 comments: SharePoint adds a paging button (the left and right arrows) in the comments web part. What happens is that, for some users, when they click the "next page" arrow, it results in an error message that says: Exception from HRESULT: 0x80131904 Correlatie-id:f8de479d-0dd1-90e3-bd66-57a04683f7f9

I already researched the issue and problem seems to be that at the end of the url "%23comments" is being appended, resulting in the error.

Looking through the log I notice at least three error messages that might be related to the cause?

1) System.Data.SqlClient.SqlException (0x80131904): Conversion failed when converting the nvarchar value '31525#comments' to data type int. at System.Data.SqlClient.SqlConnection.OnError(SqlException exception, Boolean breakConnection, Action`1 wrapCloseInAction)

2) Error while executing web part: Microsoft.SharePoint.SPException: Exception from HRESULT: 0x80131904 ---> System.Runtime.InteropServices.COMException: Exception from HRESULT: 0x80131904

3) Type mismatch with field PostTitle and value 31525#comments. f8de479d-0dd1-90e3-bd66-57a04683f7f9

Some other people seem to have the same issue:

https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/office/en-US/31335be9-60d8-43f2-ac92-9e0d2e233200/type-mismatch-with-field-posttitle-and-value-11comments

https://www.1stquad.com/sharepoint-kompetenz-erfahrung-know-how/blog/default/august-2014/fixing-the-error-paging-through-comments-of-a-blog

ps: we do have a custom branding solution that's activated as a site collection feature. I doubt if this is a real cause though, because for some users it works fine, but others do get the error. Could it be a permissions issue? Maybe caching related?

Does anyone know why this occurs and what the solution is?

Is it possible to change the Comments web part to show more than 10 items at once, to avoid the paging button?

Lastly, is it possible to change the sorting of the comments to have the most recent comment show at the top? I tried without luck (changing the view breaks the web part).

Would be great to hear your experience and feedback on these blog issues.

Answer 1

I am on the same SKU with patch level October 2015 CU. I can't reproduce the behavior with the second page you mention.

With regards to the requested ordering of comments, I was able to change the ordering by using SharePoint designer. I navigated to post.aspx within the list that contains the blog items and changed the XsltListViewWebPart webpart that is responsible for rendering the comments. In particular I have changed the following:

<OrderBy><FieldRef Name="ID" Ascending="TRUE"/></OrderBy>

To:

<OrderBy><FieldRef Name="Modified" Ascending="FALSE"/></OrderBy>

For the row limit I was able to change the following:

<RowLimit Paged="TRUE">10</RowLimit>

To:

<RowLimit Paged="TRUE">50</RowLimit>

Strangly, the BlogAdminWebPart webpart then crashed, and I had to re-add it to the page via the regular GUI.