Add URLEncode attribute to a deployed field definition

Question

Is it possible to add URLEncode to a field in schema.xml, and update the SharePoint site without deleting everything based on the schema? Eg.

<Field DisplayName="Internal/External" />

to

<Field DisplayName="Internal/External" URLENcode="true" />

I'd like to change it due to WSS not validating soap/xml on output, and having the ' / ' symbol in an attribute name will cause the XML parsing to fail in my client application.

Answer 1

Regardless of your encoding problem, updating the xml that was used to create fields will not push down the changes to existing fields based on that xml.

If you want to update the DisplayName for existing fields, you would have to write some code (in a FeatureReceiver) to do this for you.

Answer 2

I may be mistaken, but I'm not sure that setting the URLEncode attribute like this will give you the result you are looking for.

As far as I know, the URLEncode attribute will affect the formatting of the value that is stored in an instance of the actual field, it won't affect the xml definition of the field (as in your case, the DisplayName attribute)