SharePoint Designer Check Out Issue Fix

Anyone who knows me is aware of my love/hate relationship with SharePoint Designer. I hate that I am dependent on it for certain things, like for example, if I want to preview what a change in a master page will look like. As much as I would love to do this in Visual Studio, unfortunately you can’t so you must turn to SP Designer. Now don’t get me wrong, I reailze that it is a pretty good tool for creating simple workflows and stuff like that but in my opinion it is a below par tool and I despise the fact that you are dependent on it for certain things. Anway, that’s enough of my rant on Designer, now onto the problem I encountered and the solution for it.

Problem: SharePoint Designer shows a file as Checked Out Even Though it’s Not

Synopsis: I was trying to make a change to a Master Page in Designer. I opened up the site and noticed the stupid locked symbol next to it indicating that the file is checked out. So, what do I do? Well I simply click the Check In button, simple as that right? Not quite….I then got an error that “The File is No Longer Checked Out”. Ok, so next I try to just Undo The Checkout, same thing. At this point I decided I would out-smart designer and go into the SharePoint UI to check in the file. The only problem with that is, it shows the file as checked in and published in the UI.

Solution: At this point I couldn’t open the file and I was stuck so I went to my good friend Google. Luckily, I found this awesome post by Tom Puelo which helped me solve the problem. The issue is with caching so to resolve, you have to manually go in and clear your cache. Here’s how to do that:

For Windows 7 and Server 2008, open Windows Explorer and go to the following location: C:Users[user name]AppDataLocalMicrosoftWebsiteCache

Now just find the folder for the website with the files you were in that were showing checked out and delete everything in that folder. You will want to close out of Designer and open your site back up and the files should show up.

This saved me a lot of time and frustration, hope it can help others too.