Choice field changed - How to propagate the change down to all lists that used it?

Question

I have a feature (Web scoped) with a content type which contains a field (Type="Choice").

Values were A, B and C.

I've created a list based on this content type and added some elements in it.

I then added the choices D, E and F and changed the version of the feature.

I updated the solution and performed an upgrade on the feature with $feature.Upgrade($false).

I can see the changes at the Web level (content type has changed, field has changed) but the one in the list instance NOT. When I add a new element to the existing list it only shows choices A, B and C. If I create new lists based on the content type they show the now A, B, C, D, E, F choices.

How can I propagate the change into the old list so that the field shows all choices (A, B, C, D, E, F) when creating new elements?

Answer 1

Looks like you're using default Update method of SPContentType when updating your content type in feature updating receiver.

To push changes to all inherited list content types, you should use another overload of the Update method, and pass true to it:

contentType.Update(true);

Description of the parameter from MSDN:

updateChildren

Type: System.Boolean

true to push the changes made to the content type down to content types that inherit from it; otherwise, false.

Also you can check out this rather descriptive post from Charles Chen on the topic:

• http://charliedigital.com/2011/05/03/sharepoint-content-type-lifecycle-management/

Update:

In this particular situation, turned out, that you don't need to update the content type at all, since it hasn't been changed itself. The point is, that Content Types in SharePoint does not include fields definitions, they include only FieldRefs, i.e. links to existing fields.

So, if you change some properties in underlying site field, the content type keeps unchanged, and you need to update the field rather than the content type.

And with fields, the same situation with overload is in place: use SPField.Update(Boolean) overload and pass true to it to update the field and propagate the changes to all implementations of the field.

Description of the parameter from MSDN:

pushChangesToLists

Type: System.Boolean

true to propagate changes to lists that implement the field; otherwise, false.