Why does Content Type Syndication need feature used to provision content types?

Question

I'm experiencing a problem I can't quite understand.

We're provisioning content types to a content-type-hub via an installed feature. The feature deploys, the content types and site columns all deploy, and all seems just tickety-boo.

However, when a consuming site attempts to subscribe to the content type hub, the content type provisioning fails with an error that says that this exact installed feature needs to be provisioned ALSO on the consuming site.

Why would this be, and is there anything we can do to stop this from happening?

Thanks in advance
Josh

Answer 1

The reason is that when deploy via a feature (sandbox or Full Trust Code (FTC)) - the underlying database structure for the Content Types has a column called IsFromFeature which is set to 1. There are good reasons for this, mainly to enable SharePoint to remove all of the Content Types that were created with the feature when the feature is deactivated.

So. in your case, when a consuming site is receiving the content types, their schema indicates that the columns were created with a feature which is not present on the consuming site, hence the failure. The answer

1. If you really need can't avoid it, deploy the feature to the consuming site.
2. Much, much better: Create the columns and content types in the hub using CSOM (or REST)*. This will sync properly and does not have the feature ID hang-up that you're seeing. Retraction will be piece by piece but if you're deploying to the hub I'd assume that this is a thought through process where retraction is unlikely or can be managed through similar custom code.

*This will also be the only way for future On-premises and already is for O365 solutions and so should be the default approach.

Answer 2

I setup a content Type hub for my client last week without any issues.

1. have you set up the Term Store Service App settings to indicate the urls of sc which is the content type hub i. e the one with the sc ct hub feature enabled There are 4 check boxes to potentially check in the same dialog.
2. sites don't subscribe as such but Web apps do.. HNSCs make this real easy as the is only one Web app Here we look at timer job definitions for the ct hub and Web app subscriber, change schedule if you want your cts and scs to provision more quickly.
3. Remember to republish and Co if you make changes in your the ct hub

One thing that did occur as since we using publishing sites throughout we have both publishing infrastructure feature and the site publishing feature enabled. However, I don't remember these being a prerequisites so maybe you could check or try enabling.