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In my portal, I have created a few infopath forms, and promoted properties in them. When I view the content-types in the site-collection's content-type library, I see that some of the fields are in blue and are configurable, and some are in black and not configurable. The blue entries will let me view their underlying site-columns.

What is the difference? Why are some configurable and some not?

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2 Answers 2

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The answer turns out to be this: the reason the entries show as editable is because you promoted the properties in InfoPath. When you promote a property, a site-column is created in Sharepoint. Since Sharepoint site-columns are editable, they appear in blue (linked) in the list of columns for a list. They appear as black when they are only fields in the InfoPath form and are not attached to Sharepoint Site-Columns.

I hope that helps someone, as it was pretty confusing to me in the beginning. But even muddy water has clear water in it!

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Are you using Content Type hub to distribute Content Types across site collection? The Content Types published via Content Type hub are instantiated as read-only(i.e. not configurable).

In other words, a published Content Type is consumed and instantiated as a read only site collection Content Type. However, they can be changed to be writable.

Or

Some of your (non configurable) Content Type are Readonly. The ReadOnly attribute of the Content Type refers to the Content Type itself being Read Only:

<ContentType
  BaseType="Text"
  ID="Text"
  Name="Text"     
  ReadOnly="TRUE"
/>
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  • No, I'm not using a Content Type Hub. I'm not sure how they would have gotten to be read-only. I never marked anything read-only anywhere. Where would I make the change?
    – bgmCoder
    Commented Nov 22, 2012 at 22:17
  • How these content types are being provisioned i.e. using a custom Feature? You could definitely use Object model or PowerShell to make them non-ReadOnly ;)
    – Falak Mahmood
    Commented Nov 22, 2012 at 22:20
  • Via Infopath. I publish them as administrator-approved templates.
    – bgmCoder
    Commented Nov 22, 2012 at 22:29
  • InfoPath promoted columns are not treated like normal columns in SharePoint. They don't show up in Workflows and they can't be edited in the SharePoint list forms, etc. In 2007 there was a special checkbox to promote the columns as read/write that could make them full columns, but I think they removed this in 2010.
    – Falak Mahmood
    Commented Nov 22, 2012 at 23:08
  • Well, somehow, I've gotten my infopath fields to show up in the regular form, too. I'm not sure how (which is my problem!), but if I edit the infopath form, the values are effectively changed in the sharepoint form! I'd like to figure out how.
    – bgmCoder
    Commented Nov 23, 2012 at 2:13

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