Content Type Hubs and the Blank Site Template – Fixing them

2013-06-252014-11-30 Andy BurnsContent Type, ECT Hub, Site Definition, SP2010 Admin, TaxonomyLeave a comment

So, I’ve somehow managed to get through most of the SP2010 cycle without having to use the Enterprise Content Type hub – until last week. This was my opportunity to stumble across one of the gotchas of the ECT hub – it doesn’t work with blank sites. We had a number of site collections based on the Blank site template, and content types would not replicated to it. Other site collections based on other templates – such as Team sites – worked fine.

Interesting. And this tickled a neuron. Continue reading “Content Type Hubs and the Blank Site Template – Fixing them” →

Delete Event Receiver from a Content Type with Code

2012-10-102014-11-30 Andy BurnsContent Type, Event Receivers, SP2010 Development, SPContentType, SPItemEventReceiverLeave a comment

SharePoint allows you to attach event receivers to content types. That’s pretty handy. Unfortunately, deleting event receivers from those content types is much more hard. Perhaps this is why the Document ID feature fails to remove the content types that it adds. However, here is one possible approach.

SPContentType ctype = site.RootWeb.ContentTypes[SPBuiltInContentTypeId.Document];
if (ctype != null)
{
 if (ctype.EventReceivers != null)
 {
   bool bContinueDelete = true;
   while (bContinueDelete)
   {
     if (ctype.EventReceivers.Count < 1)
     {
       bContinueDelete = false;
     }
     else
     {
     bool bFoundOne = false;
     foreach (SPEventReceiverDefinition d in ctype.EventReceivers)
     {
         //Could match on the Type of the event receiver, but for this example, let's use name
         if (d.Name.Contains("Document ID"))
         {
           d.Delete();
           ctype.Update(true, false);
           bFoundOne = true;
           break;
         }
     }
     if (!bFoundOne)
     {
       bContinueDelete = false;
     }
   }
 }
}

More on why this is important in a later post.

Weird ContentType of Blog Posts

2010-04-162014-11-30 Andy BurnsBlogs, Content Type, SP2007 Development, SPContentType, SPListItem2 Comments

Okay, this is weird.

I’m trying to do something with various types of item, including Blog Posts, in SharePoint. Naturally, I’m getting the SPListItem for them, and then the SPListItem.ContentType, so I can check what kind of item is it. The weird thing is, if I try to get a Blog Post, the SPListItem.ContentType is NULL. Continue reading “Weird ContentType of Blog Posts” →

Programmatically Create Content Types

2009-12-012014-11-30 Andy BurnsContent Type, SP2007 Development, SPContentType, SPList1 Comment

This is an example of programmatically creating a content type (based on the Document content type) and adding it to a list. I’ve not added any extra columns or anything – but we could have.

string name = ... SPList list = ... SPContentType baseContentType = web.ContentTypes[SPBuiltInContentTypeId.Document]; SPContentType type = new SPContentType(baseContentType,web.ContentTypes,name); list.ContentTypes.Add(type); list.Update();

ContentTypeRef vs ContentTypeBinding

2009-04-232014-11-30 Andy BurnsCAML, Content Type, SP2007 Development1 Comment

Interesting question came up as a result of a post of Chris O’Briens:

Interesting you raise ContentTypeBinding. I use this in other areas (e.g. associating content types with Pages libraries). Don’t think it had occurred to me that I could use it here also.

Which kinda makes me wonder why the schema provides two ways of doing the same thing, but that could lead to whole ‘nother discussion 😉

Well, I get interested by questions like that. As far as I can tell…:

ContentTypeBinding elements exist in the Elements of a feature. They’re so that a feature can bind a new content type to a list
ContentTypeRef elements exist in the schema of a List definition (List > MetaData > ContentTypes > ContentTypeRef)

So, you can use the ContentTypeRef to create a list with a content type, or you can use a ContentTypeBinding to add it later. And you should be able to do it in the same feature – you could use a ListInstance to create a list using your definition, and then bind your content type. And yes, it does rather look like all three bits could be in the one Feature.

List to define the list
ListInstance to create one in your site
ContentTypeBinding to add your content type.

I wonder what happens if you try to create a list definition without a content type reference? Might try that for a giggle sometime.

Side note: the Property element on a File element in a publishing site with the key PublishingAssociatedContentType is for associating the file (a page layout) with a page content type, not for associating the page content type to the Pages library. You have to do that as well, using a ContentTypeBinding element. (Thanks Waldeck, that was driving me nuts!)

Roll up content by content-type

2009-04-072014-11-30 Andy BurnsContent Rollup, Content Type, SP2007 Development, Web PartsLeave a comment

Pointed out to me by a colleague (ages ago!) – Ton Stegeman’s ‘Content by Type‘ web part. A good way of rolling up content of diverse types, without lots of XSL. If your content type structure is right, may well be other ways of doing this (the content query web part and data view may work) – but this is quite a nice looking tool, and simpler. Need to download and have a play sometime soon.

Deploy Publishing Pages and Content Types as a feature

2009-03-132014-11-30 Andy BurnsContent Type, Features, Page Layouts, SP2007 Branding, SP2007 Development3 Comments

Aka “CAML is the bastard spawn of Satan”.

So, I’m writing a site definition to create a Publishing site. This is a bit of a first for me. One of the things I want to do is deploy a new Publishing Page Content type, and associate some layouts with it.

I started by following Andrew Connell’s instructions for a Minimal Site Definition (as in his book). This all seemed to go pretty well; testing created a new, minimal site.

Next up I wanted to deploy the Content Type and associated page layouts. Well, there wasn’t much information in his book on this – like him, I’d figured I’d write a separate Feature for deploying just the content type and page layouts – but there was very little information in his book about this. Continue reading “Deploy Publishing Pages and Content Types as a feature” →

Setting up your content types and templates…

2008-11-032014-11-30 Andy BurnsContent Type, Office, SP2007 Branding2 Comments

I received a good link in one of the comments on the blog, and I thought I’d bump this up – Sensible Document and Template Management.

I’m with Mads on this – to me the killer feature of SharePoint is how it works with Offices, and template functionality is key in that. Demos of document properties, quick parts and then the list columns in Sharepoint have a very high wow-factor (rightly so – I think it’s pretty neat too!)

However, templates are something rarely used in my experience, or not use properly anyway. Often it’s seen as an unnecessary effort, and usually everyone just starts creating their own documents from blank, or deleteing the contents from an existing document and using that one, or copying and pasting across – none of which are pretty scenarios.

Then again, often the guys actually making these templates need a good course of ‘How to use Word’. No so much with Excel – I think that people accept you need a bit of training to use it – but Word seems to be an issue.

Anyway, the point is, do try and plan building templates into your project. And that there is probably a consultancy opportunity in trying to generate these…

Self Referencing Lookup columns

2008-04-252014-11-30 Andy BurnsBug, Content Type, Lists, SP2007 DevelopmentLeave a comment

Came across something I’d not considered – self referencing lookup columns! I was doing some testing, and this totally caught me out (and caused my Outlook plugin to crash and die).

Basically, this is a Lookup column where the List that it is looking up onto is the same as the list where the lookup column is in use. In our case we had a list called ‘Issues’, and the lookup was a multi-choice look-up called ‘Related Issues’. It would let a user select things from the Issues list. All in all, a perfectly sensible use of a multiple lookup, and one I’d not thought of!

However, this in itself wouldn’t cause my plug-in to suffer an error. The problem was with the data I was getting back from the Web Services I’m using. I use the List Webservice‘s GetListContentType method to get information about the Content Type, and I then read the information about the fields. Lookup fields normally come through with an attribute List ; this is the list that’s being looked up onto, and normally it is a GUID. However, for self-referencing lookup instead of a GUID, you get a string ‘Self’‘. Okay, I can’t argue that it’s wrong, but it’s a smidgen annoying that it is inconsistent. Couldn’t it just give me the GUID and let me figure out if that’s the same list? Or use another attribute to denote that it’s a self-reference?

I don’t get why this was built that way.

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