This post will address problems with existing content types and their modification.

If you happen to modify old content types and/or their fields you might come into problems regarding making these changes visible in the manner you intended them to be. This will happen when working with existing Sharepoint content and environments/solutions. Or you might add a new field to be used in an existing page layout or any other similar situation where you might modify content types in an existing Sharepoint environment/solution.

To put it simply if you are having problems with you content types most probably it has something to do with your modifications not being “updated” properly to Sharepoint. De-activating and Activating you features might not work and trying to update things through site settings does not seem to work either.

In such cases what you need to do is to make the necessary updates through code and tell Sharepoint to “wake up” and realize that there are modifications that where made that need to be taken into account.

You can probably do it in many different ways but this was the fastest solution for me. So before you go coding something up or otherwise go nuts about it check out these links for a solution to the problem and some extra stsadm tools that might save your day and those around you. Great thanks to Mr. Gary Lapointe’s blog for this great tool:

Propagate content type changes

Problem solution download

Stsadm extra tools command index

Hope this helps someone and makes their day brighter .

Over and out!

Popularity: 3% [?]