Finding Underlying Error When Receiving the Friendly Error Message

When you receive the error

We are currently unable to serve your request

We apologize, but an error occurred and your request could not be completed. 

This error has been logged.  If you have additional information that you believe may have caused this error please report the problem here.

you need to determine the underlying error when you report it on the Community Server forums to help debug the issue. You can either retrieve the error from the exceptions log in the Control Panel or temporarily disable friendly error messages and reproduce the error.

Retrieve the Error from the Exceptions Log

Most errors causing this message are logged in the exceptions log within the Community Server Control Panel Dashboard. To retrieve the error, open the exceptions log tool. Use the criteria options to attempt to locate the error that occurred at the time that you encountered the message above. If the error occurred recently, change the Sort By field to Last Occurred and check the Include Unhandled Exception checkbox before clicking Go. The latest error will be shown first.

You can also clear the exceptions log, reproduce the error, and view the exceptions that were logged via the Exceptions report. You can clear the Exceptions Log by searching for exceptions and clicking Delete All.

Disable Friendly Error Messages

If you cannot retrieve the error from the Exceptions Log, you can disable friendly error messages by editing the web.config file.

1. Edit the web.config file in the root of your site
2. Edit the <customErrors> node in the web.config file and change mode="RemoteOnly" to mode="Off".  Be sure to match the text case shown here ("off" is not equivalent to "Off").
3. Save the web.config file.
4. Reproduce the error by accessing the site.

The underlying error message should now be shown when the error is reproduced.  When you have reproduced the error, you may want to restore mode="RemoteOnly" in the web.config file.