How my Module feature broke the Publishing Feature

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So .. there I was in SharePoint 2010, working on a new corporate website in Visual Studio 2010.

We decided we needed some image assets to be provisioned, so I decided to make use of some of the new features of VS2010 and created a “Module” SharePoint Project Item.

I added my images, telling to to deploy to RootWebOnly and setting the path as PublishingImages, everything a good SP dev should do…  or so I thought.

Deployed my solution .. blam .. Site Collection dead. I fired up the (quite excellent) ULS Viewer which told me the following error messages:

‘Failed to create the ‘Images’ library.’. Exception was: ‘Microsoft.SharePoint.SPException: A list, survey, discussion board, or document library with the specified title already exists in this Web site.

Publishing Feature activation failed. Exception: Microsoft.SharePoint.SPException: Provisioning did not succeed. Details: Failed to create the ‘Images’ library.

Now this was instant brown trousers time … the Publishing Feature was broken!!! (or so I thought).

What had actually happened was brain stunningly simple. You see .. Visual Studio had kindly placed my new Module item into a Site Scoped feature…

The Publishing Feature is Web Scoped…

Now .. hopefully the sharper reader will already have realised the predicament. As I explained in an earlier blog post (onet.xml order of execution) Site Scoped features will activate before web scoped features … more accurately my Modules feature is trying to place my images into /PublishingImages/ before the document library has been created!!

What it actually did was create a folder in the SPWeb (yes .. you can have SPFolder objects directly within an SPWeb .. you don’t need a document library) so when the Publishing feature came along the URL “/PublishingImages” was already in use!

I created a new Web scoped feature for my images module and re-deployed … everything is now working. (the publishing feature activates first .. creating the image library … and my images are placed inside it).

*sigh*

Another one to put large and clear on the blackboard of experience!

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  • Martin Hatch

    raki : you did read the blog post right? Did you try changing your feature to be WEB scoped and not SITE scoped?

  • raki

    Plz help get error : Provisioning did not succeed. Details: Failed to create the 'Pages' library.

  • Anonymous

    You're absolutley right…. Such a simple cause, such a simple fix. This time my "turn-straight-google" laziness has paid off.

    Thanks Martin!