How can I resolve Civi Dashboard Javascript error: widget.name is null?

Question

I've just upgraded a Civi 4.6.18 install to 4.7.15. All has gone fairly smoothly, apart from the fact that the CiviCRM front page/dashboard is broken.

My Firebug console reports: "TypeError: widget.name is null" and refers to http://siteroot.com/sites/all/modules/civicrm/js/jquery/jquery.dashboard.js line 467 col 13

I know that some of the dashlets that display in my dashboard have been created by setting up some reports to suit, and simply making those available as dashlets.

Looking in the database, I checked the civicrm_dashboard table, and noticed that three of these 'custom' dashlets had NULL in the name column. Interestingly, other similarly created dashlets had an entry in the name column of the form 'report/xx'.

Answer 1

I'm glad you found the cause of your problem. It does sound like something went wrong back when you originally created those dashlets, and it's not clear what that was. But it would be good to proactively repair this during the upgrade.

I've created a PR to do so: https://github.com/civicrm/civicrm-core/pull/9672

Answer 2

Also in the database in the 'url' column I see the url of the dashlet in the form: civicrm/report/instance/42?reset=1&section=2&snippet=5&context=dashlet and comparing entries with data in the name column I can see that the report instance number matches. So I replace the NULL entry with 'report/xx' where xx is the report instance number as reported in the url column, and the dashboard now loads as expected.

Question is: why did 4.6.18 work fine with NULL entries in this table while 4.7.15 breaks, and how did the broken entries get to be badly created in the first place?