"No User Profile Application Available" Mystery in SharePoint 2010

Here's another in what seems like a growing list of permissions gotchas in SharePoint 2010.  Assume if you will, you are a crack developer and building a custom application for SharePoint 2010.  You're writing code on your development server, which has a FULLY functioning installation of SharePoint 2010.  You want to work with some user profile data, so you create an instance of the UserProfileConfigManager.  Strangely, when you do this you get an exception that says "No User Profile Application available to service the request. Contact your farm administrator."

Hmm, seems strange.  You double check your settings, your user profile service application is up and running.  You're probably a farm admin even in this scenario and you are able to manage it - so what is the scoop?  You may think, ah, I need to grant myself rights to manage the application.  We've seen that behavior in another posting I published just today on working with FAST user contexts.  So you find your user profile service app, click on the Administrators button in the ribbon and give your self Full Control rights to it.  You try again - same problem.  Grrr!  Yes, this can get frustrating.  As it turns out, there is yet another place where you may need to set permissions, and this is one of those cases.  If you look in the ribbon when you select a service application, you will see the Administrators button, but there is also the Permissions button on the far right.  In this case, click the Permissions button.  Add your account and give it Full Control rights.  NOW, go back and try your code again - this time it should work.

Sorry, I wanted to add one other scenario I have seen happen.  Many times you create the ServiceContext for getting the UserProfileManager by getting a reference to an SPSite and then using the SPServiceContext.GetContext method.  What I have seen happen before is that if that site that you create the SPSite reference to allows anonymous access, you may still get this error.  When disabling anonymous access at the site collection level it started working.  Just another FYI.

Comments

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  After some "Grrr!" I finally found your blog post. Thank you!

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  This is a funny thing. I tear down and build up this service so often on my dev machine, I've forgotten this piece more than a couple times only to return to this same blog post. Thanks, Steve.

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  Referenced your post in my one: blogs.technet.com/.../configure-service-application-permissions-in-sharepoint-2010-using-powershell.aspx Thanks for the info!

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  FYI, Today I was receiving the "No User Profile Application available to service the request" message and followed the instructions in this blog post and also reset IIS. For some reason, it did not clear up until I switched the service connections on the web application to 'custom' and then switched them back again to default. I did this for both the main app and My Sites, and afterward, the error disappeared. The resolution may be some combination of permissions, IIS reset, and service connections... I don't know, and at this point, I'm just glad it's working. :-)

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  what do I do if I get this error when I try to open user profile service application ??? I'm going nutz...

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  Thanks for sharing! Still helping.

• Anonymous
  June 01, 2010
  i am still in  Grrrrrrrr! mode.. tried giving full access to me.. still same grrrrr. help me

• Anonymous
  June 10, 2010
  Have you double checked it? For me it also didn't work but after a restart I found the user lost so I retried and it worked at once!

• Anonymous
  June 14, 2010
  Will try this out and report back the results.

• Anonymous
  July 15, 2010
  Thanks so much !!  After an IISRESET it worked perfectly !!

• Anonymous
  August 03, 2010
  Worked for me, remember to close and reopen your pshell window ;)

• Anonymous
  August 06, 2010
  Thanks for the tip.  No more Grrrrrrr moments here  :)

• Anonymous
  September 18, 2010
  Thank you for this post! It saved me a lot of time and grrrrs :)

• Anonymous
  September 26, 2010
  I tried this still problem with the profile service

• Anonymous
  October 07, 2010
  Thanks.. This helped me out with a program that I was trying to use to do a bulk import of user profile pictures.  I did have to reboot the server. though an IISRESET may have worked!

• Anonymous
  October 27, 2010
  Thanks, saved me a lot of time to find this blog post! :-)

• Anonymous
  November 10, 2010
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  November 21, 2010
  Thanks very much for your sharing! It really helps me a lot!

• Anonymous
  November 26, 2010
  It's a good approach but my Grrrrrrr's not stop. I receive this error when I add a Outlook WebPart :(

• Anonymous
  January 13, 2011
  Hey thanks a lot for this!!!  It fixed my problem of doing some unit testing locally...

• Anonymous
  March 31, 2011
  Grrrr..... just wanted to join in the general growling. Thanks - had exactly this problem and your solution worked first time!

• Anonymous
  August 15, 2011
  Just what I needed at the right time.  Thanks for the post, you saved me some hair-pulling.

• Anonymous
  August 18, 2011
  This is right on.  I appreciate you posting this.  

• Anonymous
  May 04, 2013
  I got the error after recreate the User Profile Appliction Proxy, I fixed it configuring the Service Applications Associations.

• Anonymous
  February 28, 2014
  You saved the day!

• Anonymous
  May 26, 2014
  Thank for this post. It helps me a lot.

• Anonymous
  July 17, 2014
  I followed KCRyan318, I switched the service connections on the web application (only) to 'custom' , and select all service as the default profile do. The error disappear immediately.
  
  Then I switch it back to default, no futher error occur.

• Anonymous
  September 18, 2014
  The comment has been removed