Symptoms

Issue:

When building a 2nd UAT environment for testing purposes and restoring a backup from production environment to UAT environment. When trying to access the smartform after deployment, by clicking on the links for runtime and designer to run form an "Object reference not set to an instance of an object" error comes up in one of the smart forms. Other forms are working fine.
 

Diagnoses

Diagnosis:

During investigation it was found that one of the smartobjects use in the form was not returning any data when testing with the Smartobject Tester Tool , this happened as there were currently no work instances of a workflow running at the time.

After running a test instance the Smartobject started to display within the Smartobject Tester Tool. The Smartobject in question needed information from a worklist item to display.

 

Resolution

Resolution:

After having a worklist item created in workspace by running an instance of a workflow , data was populated for the smartform to work as expected and run using the designer/runtime URL without the "Object reference not set to an instance of an object".