SharePoint 2013 – Error : Error loading navigation: TermStore not found

Hi All,

Today we discuss new issue and solution 🙂

Background: We have SharePoint 2013 environment and recently created new application in our PROD environment. We have our custom master page for our pages and OOB master page for system pages. We have our custom top navigation (Global Navigation) and no left navigation (current navigation)

On setting pages on the top we noticed one statement as Error loading navigation: TermStore not found (Correlation ID: b962419e-91bf-6064-8575-d966bd6b3bbc) as

Figure 1: SharePoint 2013 – Error loading navigation – TermSet not found on all system pages

We were wondering why this kind of error is there. On our publishing pages we don’t have any such issue and our all features including termsets are working fine.

So we went and check the ULS based on Correlation ID. We found following more exceptions in log with detailed call stack. Here highlighting few important details:

Error loading navigation: TermStore not found (Correlation ID: b962419e-91bf-6064-8575-d966bd6b3bbc)

Constructing CachedExceptionData with OriginalUtcTime=01/17/2018 02:48:07, OriginalCorrelationId=1043419e-8952-c023-8070-338254e37bba: System.InvalidOperationException: TermStore not found   

at Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.Navigation.TaxonomyNavigationCache.CachedTermSet.Load(TaxonomySession taxonomySession, Int32 navigationLcid, SPSite contextSite, Guid contextWebId) at Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.Navigation.TaxonomyNavigationCache.CachedTermSet.<>c__DisplayClass1.<LoadIfNotAlreadyLoaded>b__0() at Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.Navigation.LoadableLruCachedObject.LoadIfNotAlreadyLoaded(Action loadMethodCall)

TaxonomyNavigationCache.CachedTermSet: Caching non-trackable error for 5 secs: TermStore not found

Rethrowing cached exception: Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.CachedException: TermStore not found —> System.InvalidOperationException: TermStore not found at Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.Navigation.TaxonomyNavigationCache.CachedTermSet.Load(TaxonomySession taxonomySession, Int32 navigationLcid, SPSite contextSite, Guid contextWebId) at Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.Navigation.TaxonomyNavigationCache.CachedTermSet.<>c__DisplayClass1.<LoadIfNotAlreadyLoaded>b__0()  at Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.Navigation.LoadableLruCachedObject.LoadIfNotAlreadyLoaded(Action loadMethodCall)     –

 — End of inner exception stack trace —

TaxonomySiteMapProvider: Error loading navigation term set:Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.CachedException: TermStore not found —> System.InvalidOperationException: TermStore not found  at Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.Navigation.TaxonomyNavigationCache.CachedTermSet.Load(TaxonomySession taxonomySession, Int32 navigationLcid, SPSite contextSite, Guid contextWebId)   at Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.Navigation.TaxonomyNavigationCache.CachedTermSet.<>c__DisplayClass1.<LoadIfNotAlreadyLoaded>b__0()   

 at Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.Navigation.LoadableLruCachedObject.LoadIfNotAlreadyLoaded(Action loadMethodCall)     –

 — End of inner exception stack trace —   

 at Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.Navigation.TaxonomyNavigation.GetTermSetForWeb(CachedAreaLookup cachedAreaLookup, String siteMapProviderName, Boolean includeInheritedSettings, Boolean errorsAsExceptions)   

 at Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.Navigation.TaxonomySiteMapProvider.GetCurrentNavigation

Solution: After looking detailed exception thought to check the navigation once. So go to navigation settings (Site Settings >> Look and Feel >> Navigation – /_layouts/15/AreaNavigationSettings.aspx ) to verify the navigation options set and realized that by default Global Navigation and Current Navigation are set to Managed Navigation as

Figure 2: SharePoint 2013 – Navigation Settings : Default Navigation – “Managed Navigation”

Then we verified which TermSet is set but found that there is no TermSet selected for Managed Navigation as

Figure 3: SharePoint 2013 – Managed Navigation – No Term Set is selected

So basically, this error occurs when there is navigation set to “Managed Navigation” and no term set selected for “Managed Navigation”.  This happen since we didn’t verify the navigation settings after creating web application and site collection. We have our custom master page and custom navigation. No OOB navigation setting in our custom master page.

This is good lesson learning for us 🙂

Thanks for reading 🙂

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