Last 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 😉
February 27, 2008 at 2:52 pm
Thank you so much for posting this. I spent hours trying to solve this problem, and you probably saved me weeks!
October 5, 2008 at 5:27 am
Very useful and thanks for posting. I always thought that braces will not make differences. In this case, it did.
February 6, 2009 at 1:13 pm
look this GeeksWithBlogs
June 10, 2009 at 1:06 pm
Thank you for refreshing my mind 😉
December 21, 2011 at 5:38 pm
This error can also occur if you are deploying an Event Receiver where you have named a specific list/library URL in the Elements.xml but that list/library does not exist when you activate the feature.
July 2, 2014 at 4:33 am
I had { } in my XML but still same exception was coming in the log. I had Overwrite=”TRUE” also, I remove Overwrite=”TRUE” from the tag and it worked fine.
Thanks for the post!
June 27, 2016 at 6:43 pm
as Ismail suggested removing Overwrite=”True” worked for me too.