Like many people out there I’ve been suffering with a well documented problem that went unfixed for a long time. Namely when saving a document to a library with content types in Office 2003 causing a script error. There’s a long thread about it on the Microsoft forums. Interestingly I also achieved the behaviour of having the document properties window showing NOTHING at all when faced with 10 content types.

Fortunately for everyone a patch (950292) became available in March of this year. It’s available from Microsoft but only on request here.

So after installing the patch I had great hopes that it would solve the problem – but it didn’t work 100% which is why I’m writing this post.

After much faffing about I had a moment of inspiration that it might be a problem of my own making. I quickly created a test document library using the OOB feature, added all my content types in and the properties window worked fine. Then I created one based on a custom feature of mine, added in the content types and it didn’t work! The problem was clearly at a very base level and wasn’t something I’d done to the document library.

The problem actually turned out to be a really simple one for me. This custom feature I was using had a copy of the schema.xml from the out of the box DocumentLibrary feature. This copy was taken when I built my feature way back in October last year on a non-SP1 and largely unpatched box. After quick look at the patch contents I noticed it contained this schema.xml file. I swiftly replaced the schema.xml in my custom feature then force activated the feature on the site. Back into the library and the problem was fixed!

The fix of course has opened up another question of “well what else of mine is broken/out-of-date?”. The next time a patch is delivered for SharePoint I’ll have to look very carefuly at what it updates and see which of my own features and customisations I will need to ammend to take advantage of these fixes.

I need me a rear wing like those boys are using.

Amazing what happens when you set your mind to rehashing an article you saw in Practical Photography, or another magazine eh?