I’ve been working on a custom field for, well, a while now, and after making some changes I started to get the error “To save to the server, correct the invalid or missing required properties” when trying to edit a document and save the changes back in Word 2007. This was a little strange, as I’d already sorted out hiding the custom field from the document information panel, and things had been working fine since then.
New documents seemed to be alright, but the older ones weren’t. So, maybe the problems were all the old documents, rather than my field.
Eventually, I came across this knowledgebase article – so I “inspected” the document, removed any of it’s custom data, and resaved it – and it worked fine.
What I think happened here was, I was testing different settings for Content Approval and Versioning on my document libraries. I think the troublesome documents were created when one of those was set to be ‘on’, and I subsequently turned it ‘off’. This meant that the document actually had extra data that referred to a column that no longer existed (I think) – which probably means this is related to Content Approval.
But I’d be curious if anyone else has managed to cause this error, and how they did so.
Andy Burns' Blog 
It happens to me only when I email a document to sharepoint library. How can I stop all the extra properties that are generated when I email a document?
The problem is probably custom data within the document (quite often, hidden within the document) rather than anything to do with it being emailed.
Did you try the above steps?
Andy,
I had the same problem. I was turning Versioning on and off during my testing, adding a few fields, changing the names of others. I thought this was the source of my issues, but it turns out it that it was only part of it.
I have an interesting set up where a workflow transfers information from one SharePoint list to a document library. The problem was that some fields were left blank and I guess a NULL value was transferred which was causing this issue.
Nevertheless, your post helped me track down the issue!
Thanks!
Hi Andy, well after months of using Sharepoint we still have the same problem. It only happens when we email a document to the library. If we upload directly from Sharepoint it’s fine. Yes I tried the steps. I have searched the internet for months but nothing seems to work. Any new info would be awesome. PS. Yes I can inspect the document to get rid of the error, but that is a huge pain to have 75 – 100 people have to inspect the document everytime they want to email a document to sharepoint.
Thank you,
Jeff
Hmm. No, I never did find any more information about it. I wonder – your emailed documents – do they all come from one template or anything?
We have run into this problem in the past, seemingly at random, but now it seems to be happening all the time. We have custom fields that have never worked in the DIP, and hiding them has made no difference — now Word/Excel complain that the properties are blank but are not displayed in this DIP view. Inspecting and removing custom data and fields didn’t fix the problm either.
I don’t understand why Microsoft has made it so incredibly difficult to simply disable the DIP. You used to be able to do it in 2003 via code, but now that functionality has been removed. In our case we just want it to go away because we edit the properties through SharePoint.
As a workaround, what I have found works is as follows:
1) Edit the document from SharePoint and make sure you check out the document to your local drafts folder.
2) Make changes and save.
3) Close the document. DO NOT CHECK IT IN FROM THE CLIENT!
4) Check in from SharePoint.
I am not yet ready to admit defeat and simply open a support call with Microsoft, but I am getting close.
OK…Got it. It was one of our custom fields, which we had suspected. I was trying to debug the code to find where the failure was occurring, but that proved seemingly impossible because Word/Excel got most upset if they did not get a response from the server in a timely fashion when attempting to check in. I was debugging, so of course it didn’t respond immediately, but Word/Excel would barf after a couple of seconds, so it was obvious this wasn’t going to work.
Anway, on the solution. I was going to make the field not required, because it is not editable anyway, but the though made me feel dirty. So instead I decided to make the field read only (I guess the original developers decided that wasn’t necessary seeing as the control never renders an editable control anyway). So I set ReadOnlyField to TRUE (equates to the ReadOnly XML schema attribute). Yay, that worked! But…Uh oh…Deja Vu. There is what appears to me to be a bug in SharePoint. Settting a field to ReadOnly should logically hide it from New/Edit forms, and this is what the documentation clearly states (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms437580.aspx). However, it _also_ hides from the property display form, which is not cool. Sure, I could of added the field to a view (presumably that worked — it is supposed to, but I didn’t test it). Instead I tried setting the ReadOnlyEnforced to TRUE instead (there is no XML schema attribute equivalent to this property that I can see). BINGO! Problem solved.
Thank you very much for the code you posted to set the field’s schema attribute — I incorporated that into our STSADM command for setting site column properties.
Ah, yep. With Custom Fields you might find this useful:
http://www.novolocus.com/2010/04/13/hide-a-custom-field-from-the-dip/
(as mentioned above)
I was able to avoid the “Required Properties To save to the server, correct the invalid or missing required properties.” message by using the following trick:
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en/sharepointcustomization/thread/023dc9ab-5e41-4c85-bb80-54654df3b350
Hi,
Thank you for this helpful post. I had same problem but more wierred.
I have one Word 2010 document. with some custom properties. I copied the documents and uploaded on SharePoint 2010but for the second one (the copy) always I get this error “To save to the server, correct the invalid or missing required properties”
thanks
I’m somewhat new to dealing with Sharepoint metadata. I’ve been searching for some time to find an answer, and this thread is the closest so far.
I have an email enabled library for receiving and processing resumes. I created a couple of custom fields to help organize and sort them. I also created a custom workflow to parse subject and body for key words and set the custome fields based on those, and notify the correct manager. When the documents are opened from the link included in the notification, the DIP is displayed and fields can be changed, but saving fails with the typical missing required items. The only method that has worked so far is to inspect the document and clear XML data, then save and re-open. The template is based on OOTB document type. There are no hidden fields, and the only required fields are Name and Nick Name. The culprit is Nick Name, but I cannot figure out how to either delete that field, or make it optional. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Ok, it’s really simple. Go to the Document Properties in the library settings. Make sure you have edit content types set to yes in Advanced settings first. Then you can click on Document. There are a bunch of email fields that are being required or are set to optional. You have to set them to Hidden in order to be able to email documents to Sharepoint and not get the error about missing properties.
@ Jeff….
Works perfectly – easy as you said!
Thanks!
I am getting the same issue as described by this page but my symptom is that the documents have a policy applied to them which requires them to have a label.
In SharePoint 2007 we never had any problems but since going to SharePoint 2010 a couple of months back it seems that this Label is regularly now flagged as invalid (red border around property when you go to File/Info Show all properties in word).
The only way we can get the document to save is to reduce the length of variables used within the Label until it is less than 255 characters. I cannot see where we can increase this threshold and it was never an issue in 2010, we have labels in excess of 300+ characters from the previous system.
I am in a world of label/document related pain currently and would appreciate any pointers.
Thanks
Hmm. Sorry, I’ve not got a huge amount of experience with labels. I’m surprised that they worked in 2007 and then not in 2010 – I can’t imagine that the column got any narrower.
We were having essentially the same issue with one document in a library with 10,000 docs. A choice column with “Yes” or “No” as the only options is a required field. The field is set to “Yes” for that document, but when you check it out and edit it, then try to save it, the field shows up as blank in document properties. I was able to “fix” it by making the column not required, but changing a library-wide setting for one document seems insane. It now works, and is not blanking out the column, but I cannot change it back, and make it required again or the problem returns.
Had the same problem here. We had a document library with a couple custom fields set to optional. Could upload files through SP without a problem but emailing files directly into the library began giving us a problem. The file would upload ok but would give the described missing property error when we tried to edit it. Both Excel and Word but only on files emailed into the library. I tried the solution given above by Jeff Emrick and it worked like a champ! Thank you, Jeff!
Sweet. I’m glad it worked for you Jeff P. Why Microsoft makes things so hard to begin with I’m not sure!
Jeff
Hi,
Stuck with similar issues and its spread across many doc lib’s. We have migrated form SPS 2003 to SPS2010, At least this post helps in identifying some work around. Have we ever got permanent resolution for this issues from MS ?
Thanks
Add a content type for “Basic Page” and set it to be the default for the library:
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/sharepoint/en-US/5aa8288e-c93d-4d9d-83b3-9eb31893622e/not-able-to-edit-the-emailed-document-to-sharepoint-library?forum=sharepointgeneralprevious