ArgumentNullException when calling Enterprise Search Web Service
Posted
Thursday, February 26, 2009 4:14 PM
by
CoreyRoth
Last week, I demonstrated how to call the Enterprise Search web service to get search results to a colleague. I pointed him to my post on querying a web service and he was able to easily put the code together to call the web service. However, when his code called the service, he got the following error.
<ResponsePacket xmlns="urn:Microsoft.Search.Response">
<Response domain="QDomain">
<Status>ERROR_SERVER</Status>
<DebugErrorMessage>System.ArgumentNullException</DebugErrorMessage>
</Response>
</ResponsePacket>
When I tried my code to call the web service, everything worked fine. After a bit of troubleshooting, I remembered him saying that he was going to specify the web service address by IP because he wanted to call the web service over the VPN and DNS hasn’t worked so well lately over it. I immediately though to have him change to the server name (as I have experienced other issues with IP addresses in the past) and everything immediately began to work. The lesson to be learned is again, never try to access a SharePoint server by IP address. Although some things might work, many things don’t. This might be solvable with an alternate access path, but I find it easier just to avoid the IP thing all together.