How to unhide a column on site collection level in O365

Question

I have some custom column created by office dev pnp template. It was visible initial. Then I set this column on hidden.

<Field ID="{1ada65e8-4f90-46c5-a663-a5812131215e}" Name="WorkspaceType" DisplayName="Workspace type" Type="Choice" Required="TRUE" Group="Valo" SourceID="{3647d1ac-79f7-474e-90ed-73078508a792}" StaticName="WorkspaceType" AllowDeletion="TRUE" EnforceUniqueValues="FALSE" Indexed="FALSE" FillInChoice="FALSE" Format="Dropdown" Hidden="TRUE" >
          <CHOICES>
            <CHOICE>Team</CHOICE>
            <CHOICE>Community</CHOICE>
            <CHOICE>Internal Project</CHOICE>
            <CHOICE>Proposal</CHOICE>
            <CHOICE>External Project</CHOICE>
          </CHOICES>
        </Field>

Now I would like to unhide this column. It is not working in office dev pnp template so I would like to do that in powershell. I try this but it is not working:

Connect-PnPOnline -Url http://myO365SiteCollection.com
$field = Get-PnPField -Identity WorkspaceType 
$field.Hidden = $False 
$field.Update()

$ctx = Get-PnPContext
$ctx.ExecuteQuery()

After this I go to site settings and go to columns. I still not see my column. I close the powershell window and open a new instance. I check what the value is of field.hidden property and it says it is true. So my change is not executed. What I am doing wrong. If someone know another solution how to unhide a column please let me know.

Answer 1

Not really sure why PnP powershell is not working as expected, but you can use CSOM with powershell to make it visible as below:

$User = "admin@tenant.onmicrosoft.com"
#enter site your collection url
$SiteURL = https://tenant.sharepoint.com/sites/site 


#Add references to SharePoint client assemblies and authenticate to Office 365 site – required for CSOM
Add-Type -Path "C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\15\ISAPI\Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.dll"
Add-Type -Path "C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\15\ISAPI\Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.Runtime.dll"
$Password = Read-Host -Prompt "Please enter your password" -AsSecureString
$Creds = New-Object Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.SharePointOnlineCredentials($User,$Password)

#Bind to site collection
$Context = New-Object Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.ClientContext($SiteURL)
$Creds = New-Object Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.SharePointOnlineCredentials($User,$Password)
$Context.Credentials = $Creds

$fieldTitle = "WorkspaceType"
$customfield = $Context.Site.RootWeb.Fields.GetByInternalNameOrTitle($fieldTitle) 
$customfield.Hidden = $false
$customfield.UpdateAndPushChanges($true)

$Context.ExecuteQuery()

Answer 2

I had the same problem, and solved it with the following line:

$field.Context.ExecuteQuery()

Instead of your original 2 lines:

$ctx = Get-PnPContext
$ctx.ExecuteQuery()