Office 365 – PnP – Exporting sites with welcome pages not set to a page

Today I tried to export a site as a PnP template and I was getting an annoying error:

Get-PnPProvisioningTemplate : Cannot invoke method or retrieve property from null object. Object returned by the following call stack is null.

“ListItemAllFields

”

At D:\Temp\DMPowershell\GetPnPTemplateClients.ps1:9 char:1

+ Get-PnPProvisioningTemplate -Web $sourceWeb -Out “d:\Temp\DMPowershel …

+ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

+ CategoryInfo          : WriteError: (:) [Get-PnPProvisioningTemplate], ServerException

+ FullyQualifiedErrorId : EXCEPTION,SharePointPnP.PowerShell.Commands.Provisioning.GetProvisioningTemplate

Quite quickly I found out that it had something to do with the Welcome Page. My page was set to:

https:/ /tenant.sharepoint.com/clients/Lists/ClientList/AllItems.aspx

Ah, that is a list view.

First I wasn’t sure what to do and I logged the issue on the tech community site.

Then after the bi-weekly pizza Friday lunch we have at my work and I got my brain into gear, I found a good solution.

The Get-PnPProvisioningTemplate has an option to exclude Page contents. And as my site in this case doesn’t have any pages that are in use I could savely export my template using:

Get-PnPProvisioningTemplate … -ExcludeHandlers PageContents

The site is now exported while my welcome page is set to the list view.