SharePoint Config

The first part of this two part series discussed some of the problems with provisioning SharePoint 2010 managed metadata fields. This post will cover a robust method of deploying SharePoint 2010 managed metadata columns in a way that avoids common errors and enables the columns to automatically show up in the search refinement panel.

To recap on the previous post we are aiming to avoid the following problems when creating SharePoint 2010 taxonomy fields through features:

1. If you create a list definition that uses this site column you get the error: Failed to get value of the “{0}” column from the “Managed Metadata” field type control. See details in log. Exception message: Invalid field name. {00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000}.
2. The managed metadata column does not appear in

I’ve been working with the managed metadata functionality provided in SharePoint 2010 fairly extensively over the past few months. While it is a great feature and works well when used through the UI it has several rough edges that can cause problems when you are deploying features that use managed metadata fields. Some of these have been documented elsewhere but some of these haven’t so this will be the first of two posts covering (1) some of the potential problems using managed metadata (this post), and (2) a robust way of provisioning SharePoint 2010 managed metadata fields.

When you use the Visual Studio 2010 SharePoint List Definition template the view that is rendered in file dialog boxes when opening and saving Office documents is blank. This causes a loss of functionality if you are creating custom document library definitions as you cannot navigate folders or use metadata sorting in the dialog window. Thankfully there is a relatively easy fix as described in the article.

There are several steps involved in creating a custom list definition in SharePoint 2007. These are: reate custom site columns (Optional), create custom content types (Optional), create custom list definition. Continue reading Creating a Custom SharePoint 2007 List Definition »