After retracting webpart solution webparts still showing up

Question

I retract a webpart solution that was deployed via Visual Studio. Then when i edit a page for some reason the Custom category + the webparts are still being listed when i try to insert a webpart. Anyone have an idea what happened?? The features for the webparts were deactivated and removed...so why are they still showing up (and causing an error when you try to add them)

Answer 1

When you deploy a solution with a WebPart it deploys three things:

• The dll with the web part
• A SafeControl entry to be inserted into web.config
• A .webpart (or .dwp) file with configuration settings to be inserted into the Web Part Gallery (this part actually happend at feature activation not at solution deploy, but..)

When you're adding a web part to a page SharePoint lists the files from the Web Part Gallery

When SharePoint is rendering the Web Part it's using the dll and the SafeControl entry in web.config

When you retract the Solution it removes two things:

• The dll with the web part
• The SafeControl entry

But (as with Modules) it leaves the file deployed and this causes the web part to show up when you're adding web parts to a page.

One way to get rid of it is described at my blog FeatureReceiver To Cleanup WebPart Files

Answer 2

To fully remove it you have to maunally delete the .webpart or .dwp file from the wp gallery manually.

Go to [site]/_catalogs/wp/Forms/AllItems.aspx and you will see all of the webparts.

You might also like to check this post out

By the way, I normally deploy webparts as solution files and if i want to remove them, I retract them from Central Admin > operation's > solution management > then retract solution and then delete it.

Hope it helped :) !

Answer 3

on the page, click on the url where the webpart is and at the end put in "?contents=1" doing this should allow you to see the webpart that are still on the page, select the webpart and remove them. Then goto the webpart gallery and remove it. then retract the solution from sharepoint central admin.

now you can readd the webparts and features :)

Hope it helps!