Get Rid of Orphaned Content Types in SharePoint 2013

One of my customers has a SharePoint 2013 farm with content migrated from SharePoint 2010.

In the past on SharePoint 2010 they have had the Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Reporting Services-Add-In for SharePoint enabled on some sites. Because they did not need it any more they removed it from SharePoint but without deactivating the Report Server feature on each site collection.

Now on SharePoint 2013 this lead to problems with 3 orphaned content types:

  • Report Builder Model
  • Report Builder Report
  • Report Data Source

First I tried to remove the corresponding feature “ReportServer” with ID e8389ec7-70fd-4179-a1c4-6fcb4342d7a0 from the site:

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Get-SPFeature : Cannot find an Enabled Feature object with Id: e8389ec7-70fd-4179-a1c4-6fcb4342d7a0 in scope Site Url: https://sp2013.kc-dev.com/sites/reportingservices.

 

Than I tried to remove the content types manually using the web GUI and PowerShell. I got this errors:

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and

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Same message: “The content type “Report Builder Model” is part of an application feature.”

 

After reading some articles I found two propesed ways:

At last I found another way to get rid of the orphaned site collections.

In the following demo I use the content types of the Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Reporting Services SharePoint Addon. I installed it on a SharePoint 2010 platform and created a site collection “https://sp2010.kc-dev.com/sites/reportingservices” in a seperate content database.

Than I migrated this content database to SharePoint 2013 including site collection upgrade. – New URL: https://sp2013.kc-dev.com/sites/reportingservices

Than I checked the usage of the content types using the static method GetUsage of Microsoft.SharePoint.SPContentTypeUsage.

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In my case all 3 content types are used in a single list. It is necessary to remove each usage of each content type!! – In my case I deleted the list. After deletation it need to be removed from the recycle bin too!

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… and also from the site collection recycle bin!

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Now my site collection is clean. No results when checking the usage again:

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After that I created a new folder in the FEATURES sub folder in the SharePoint hive:

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Than I created the following script to create a dummy feature inside this folder. The dummy feature uses EXACLTY the same feature Id as the missing feature containing the orphaned content types.

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Note #1: The feature ID is the same as for the original Reporting Services feature!

Note #2: For this content types it is necessary to remove the XmlDocuments tag and ist content. Otherwise the next step will fail.

With that script I took the cotnent type XML out of SharePoint into a elements.xml file.

Than I was able to install the feature using PowerShell:

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At this point the missing feature is back in SharePoint. The system now will not moan if I deactivate the feature.

BEFORE deactivating I made a screenshot of the site content types page:

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After this command…

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… the site content types page looks like this:

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The orphaned content types are gone!

Note: Maybe you get an error during deactivation saying the feature is not active at the scope. In this case you need to activate the feature first and deactivate it afterwards!

The last step is to remove the dummy feature:

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That’s it.

Here you download the script if you like: http://bit.ly/OCToWx

Cross Site Scripting with SharePoint 2013 REST calls

Today I had to figure out how to query a SharePoint 2013 REST service from another domain.

It took a while to find the correct settings. 😉

There was no list on the internet so I want to post it here as reference. – If you have additions to it please post them in the comments.

My test bed:

  1. I created two web applications
  2. At the root of both web apps I created a “Team Site” site collection.
  3. I uploaded a copy of jQuery to the masterpage catalog of http://fromhere.kc-dev.com .
  4. Also to the masterpage catalog of this site I uploaded a script file named “crosssitescripting.js” containing the REST call to http://tohere.kc-dev.com/_api .
  5. On the homepage of the root site collection of http://fromhere.kc-dev.com I added some script tags to load the script files jQuery.js and crosssitescripting.js. And a div tag for the sub web list.

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I opened the homepage of http://fromhere.kc-dev.com in the browser and got an error in the F12 dev tools of the Internet Explorer. As expected.

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Now I added some web.config modifications using PowerShell to enable cross site scripting. (Some years ago I wrote a note on that topic: https://blog.kenaro.com/2010/09/02/add-web-config-modification-with-powershell-spwebconfigmodification)

After reloading the site I could see the sub web list:

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Here is the content of crosssitescripting.js

$(document).ready(function(){
    $.support.cors = true;
    $.ajax({
        url: "http://tohere.kc-dev.com/_api/Web/Webs",
        type: "GET",
        crossDomain: true,
        dataType: "json",
        headers: { "Accept": "application/json; odata=verbose" },
        xhrFields: { withCredentials: true },
        success: function (response) {
            var ul = $("#weblist").append("<ul/>");
            $(response.d.results).each(function(){
                $("<li>"+this.Url+"</li>").appendTo(ul);
            });
        },
        error: function (xhr, status) {
            debugger;
        }
    });
});

Here is the PowerShell script to add the web.config modifications:

Add-PSSnapin Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell -EA 0

$localFarm = Get-SPFarm

$webapp = Get-SPWebApplication "http://tohere.kc-dev.com"

# Remove old web.config modifications of MyAuthenticationProvider
$oldMods = @();
$webapp.WebConfigModifications | ? { $_.Owner -eq "CrossSiteScripting" } | % { 
    $oldMods = $oldMods + $_
}

$oldMods | % { 
    $webapp.WebConfigModifications.Remove($_) 
}

# update the Web Application and apply all existing web.config modifications - this executes the "remove" actions from above
$webapp.Update()
[Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPWebService]::ContentService.ApplyWebConfigModifications()

#Wait until web.config modifications finished by timer job
while( (Get-SPTimerJob | ? { $_.Name -eq "job-webconfig-modification"}) -ne $null ) {
    Write-Host "." -NoNewline
    Start-Sleep 1
}

# New web.config modifications for MyAuthenticationProvider
$myModification1 = new-object Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPWebConfigModification
$myModification1.Path = "configuration/system.webServer/httpProtocol/customHeaders"
$myModification1.Name = "add[@name='Access-Control-Allow-Origin'][@value='http://fromhere.kc-dev.com']"
$myModification1.Sequence = 0
$myModification1.Owner = "CrossSiteScripting"
#0 = for the enum value "SPWebConfigModification.SPWebConfigModificationType.EnsureChildNode"
$myModification1.Type = 0
$myModification1.Value = "<add name='Access-Control-Allow-Origin' value='http://fromhere.kc-dev.com' />"
$webapp.WebConfigModifications.Add($myModification1)

$myModification1 = new-object Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPWebConfigModification
$myModification1.Path = "configuration/system.webServer/httpProtocol/customHeaders"
$myModification1.Name = "add[@name='Access-Control-Request-Method'][@value='GET,POST,HEAD,OPTIONS']"
$myModification1.Sequence = 0
$myModification1.Owner = "CrossSiteScripting"
$myModification1.Type = 0
$myModification1.Value = "<add name='Access-Control-Request-Method' value='GET,POST,HEAD,OPTIONS' />"
$webapp.WebConfigModifications.Add($myModification1)

$myModification1 = new-object Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPWebConfigModification
$myModification1.Path = "configuration/system.webServer/httpProtocol/customHeaders"
$myModification1.Name = "add[@name='Access-Control-Request-Headers'][@value='Content-Type,Authorization']"
$myModification1.Sequence = 0
$myModification1.Owner = "CrossSiteScripting"
$myModification1.Type = 0
$myModification1.Value = "<add name='Access-Control-Request-Headers' value='Content-Type,Authorization' />"
$webapp.WebConfigModifications.Add($myModification1)

$myModification1 = new-objectMicrosoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPWebConfigModification
$myModification1.Path = "configuration/system.webServer/httpProtocol/customHeaders"
$myModification1.Name = "add[@name='Access-Control-Allow-Credentials'][@value='true']"
$myModification1.Sequence = 0
$myModification1.Owner = "CrossSiteScripting"
$myModification1.Type = 0
$myModification1.Value = "<add name='Access-Control-Allow-Credentials' value='true' />"
$webapp.WebConfigModifications.Add($myModification1)

$webapp.Update()
[Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPWebService]::ContentService.ApplyWebConfigModifications()

#Wait until web.config modifications finished by timer job
while( (Get-SPTimerJob | ? { $_.Name -eq "job-webconfig-modification"}) -ne $null ) {
    Write-Host "." -NoNewline
    Start-Sleep 1
}