Edit SharePoint Request Access Page

When a user does not have access to a site, they will recieve the default request access page.   This is the page located at:

And physically located at:

If you go open the file from it’s physical path, you’ll notice none of the text you want to edit is available there, instead it is full of resource references that look like this:

In this resource format, the wss represents the file containing the resource, and the reqacc_desc_text represents the key in the resource file.

But, they are localized, the the resource file your probably looking for is wss.en-US.resx and you can find it in the site folder:

wwwrootwssVirtualDirectories<port>App_GlobalResources

Open the file up in notepad, and edit the tags as you would like.  No IIS Reset required, just refresh the page to see the change.

There is one additional catch.  If you want to put HTML in those tags, you’ll have to make another change.

Back in your regacc.aspx, you’ll notice the resource includes are EncodedLiterals, with an attribute set, “EncodeMethod=’HtmlEncode'”.  You’ll need to change this attribute value to “EncodeMethod=’NoEncode'” to keep it from escaping your HTML tags. 

Then, when you put your HTML into the resource file, make sure you escape it entirely, it will show up correctly on the page then.

One last note, if you have masterpage trouble after saving reqacc.aspx from SharePoint designer (I Did), check the MasterPageFile attribute at the top of the page.  I had to remove the URL portion (leave it as just “simple.master”) and re-save to have everything working.