We recently re-launched the New Project Wizard in Project Online , and this should present you with a page showing all your enterprise project types along with their descriptions so that you can create new projects by selecting one. Thanks to Alex in our EMEA team for getting to two root causes of this one – and we are working on a fix for the second. The page should look something like this:
But customers were finding that their create a new project page rendered like the below screen capture with just the title – and this reproduced with IE, Chrome and Firefox.
One cause was found to be the use of IE8, or other old unsupported browsers, and the solution here is to use a supported browser.
The second cause was found to be new line characters in the description of the Enterprise Project Type – so for example by changing the description for the Marketing Campaign EPT in the above example from:
“This does not have a new line” to:
Then this will trigger a script error like the one below (only shown if you set your browser to display script errors). The key thing in IE 11 being Invalid Character and Unable to get property ‘GetEptInfo’ of undefined or null reference, or this may be seen in the Chrome as Unexpected token and Cannot read property ‘GetEptInfo’ of undefined, or Firefox as SyntaxError: JSON.parse: bad control character in string literal and TypeError: this._eptControl is undefined.
If you click Yes to debug then looking at some of the strings it was handling you would find the following against argument ‘e’.
….."Name\":\"Marketing Campaign\",\"ImgSrc\":\"NewProjectTileCustom.png\",\"Description\":\"This does \r\nhave a new line\",\"CreateUrl\"…..
Basically a carriage return line feed – which will mean more to people of my age I guess than some of the younger readers. What's a carriage?
The quick fix is to remove any new lines from your descriptions – just typing one long line will work although I understand that limits the look and feel you might want to present. Thanks again Alex and the other engineers working to get this one tied down.
*** Update 6/6/14 - I should also point out that this can occur if ANY of your EPT descriptions has the new line - not just the one you happen to have selected - as the gallery of EPTs is still being pulled in. SO check ALL of your EPTs for the condition if you see this problem. Thanks Felicia for suggesting this update! ***