“Master” feature?

Question

I'm building a complex application that is composed by multiples features of different kind.

I want to avoid having all features individually able to be activated from the site admin page.

What my options (Sandboxed solution is not available) ?

I can see three solutions, all consisting in hiding features (HIDDEN=true) :

• Activate all features from a PS script
• Create a custom site template, and specify all features in the onet.xml. This will breaks features stappling I fear
• Create a "Master" feature, visible, that only performs other features activation

What is the best solution ? Is there any other solution I missed ?

ps: sp 2010 enterprise

Answer 1

I like the idea of hiding all of your features and having one un-hidden feature that activates the hidden ones.

Answer 2

I do this all the time and have even written my own SPFeatureReceiver class to streamline the creation of such features.

The workhorse of the class though is really just this:

foreach (Guid id in FeatureGuids)
{
    if (oWeb.Features[id] == null)
    {
        oWeb.Features.Add(id);
    }
}

Where FeatureGuids is just a list of web scoped feature GUIDs (The guid can be found in the feature manifest file). SPSite also has a features collection that you can do this on.

Answer 3

Of course, one might ask the question why you're breaking it up into many features if they are all dependant on each other and hidden - Why not just deploy them as a single feature? There's no requirement to have different things in different features (Except where they have to be deployed at different levels - farm/webapp/site/web).

But, if you must do it like this, do ensure that the solution/feature dependancies are defined. Scripting or having a 'master' feature would be down to your preference - I'm not aware of any best practise regarding this (although I would probably script the feature activation myself).