Unable to locate the xml-definitionLast week I was building a feature to create a new content type and a few site columns. After publishing it to my SharePoint site, I was unable to activate the feature and in the log files I retrieved the following exception message:

Unable to locate the xml-definition for FieldName with FieldId ’92d1b674-dd3a-4c43-9a50-37803d8252d1′, exception: Microsoft.SharePoint.SPException: Catastrophic failure (Exception from HRESULT: 0x8000FFFF (E_UNEXPECTED)) —> System.Runtime.InteropServices.COMException (0x8000FFFF): Catastrophic failure (Exception from HRESULT: 0x8000FFFF (E_UNEXPECTED)) at Microsoft.SharePoint.Library.SPRequestInternalClass.GetGlobalContentTypeXml(String bstrUrl, Int32 type, UInt32 lcid, Object varIdBytes) at Microsoft.SharePoint.Library.SPRequest.GetGlobalContentTypeXml(String bstrUrl, Int32 type, UInt32 lcid, Object varIdBytes) — End of inner exception stack trace — at Microsoft.SharePoint.Library.SPRequest.GetGlobalContentTypeXml(String bstrUrl, Int32 type, UInt32 lcid, Object varId…

I was unlucky, because uncle Google returned the magic number of zero results.

It took me some time to figure out what was the problem, and the answer is to include brackets { } around the used GUIDs in the SiteColumn field ID’s. It’s a strange inconsistency in the GUID usage, because on all other places it is not required.

Let’s hope you know what to do now, when you ever experience this error 😉