DNN Module Actions Menu items are missing

Somehow, during two of my recent DotNetNuke upgrades, from 9.4.1 and 9.4.4 to 9.5, I started to experience some weird problems. The one I spent a few hours on this evening was that the Module Actions menu (module settings, export content, import content, help, print, develop, delete, refresh) was simply missing.

When mousing over the Gear icon in the actions menu for the Module, I was presented with the MOVE action menu items

When mousing over the MOVE menu, I was presented with long list of BLANK menu items.

Digging around I didn’t have much luck figuring out what the cause was. I tried changing the skin, changing containers (for the page), added a new page, tested different modules, always the same result. I even had this happening on multiple portals in that same install.

Ultimately I started looking at the HTML source code of the page and noticed that the JSON for the "adminActions: [{"Actions":[],"ID":12,"Visible":true,"" started at ID 12 or 13 depending on the portal, which made me think that there was something missing in the back end, not on the front end items.

That let me to a search for the term “adminactions”, looking at ModuleActions.ascx I searched for AdminActionsJSON and the reference at https://github.com/dnnsoftware/Dnn.Platform/blob/c35fdc7fb75db0438f3b872ce4e279e3ea73e7c2/DNN%20Platform/Website/admin/Menus/ModuleActions/ModuleActions.ascx.cs#L159 

That let me to look in the App_GlobalResources folder in the root of my troubled site, and the realization that GlobalResources.resx file was missing. I uploaded that file via FTP to the folder, and the Module Actions on the page started working again. From there I went into the module settings (which I couldn’t access easily before) and found this:

That led me to the realization that I was missing a LOT more resource files, that’s why most of the above screenshot was blank.

Something went wrong with my upgrade, actually both upgrades I did, where I had these odd random files “missing” after the upgrade. To fix this instance, I uploaded all the 9.5 UPGRADE files again, except for the INSTALL folder.

If someone else ever experiences this problem, hopefully this post will help them track it down faster than it took me to resolve.