[MOSS/WSSv3] Feature cleanup

Have you ever seen the following error in one of your logs:

Failed to determine definition for Feature with ID '<guid>'. Skipping this feature for element querying consideration.

This message is caused by a feature that has been removed from the environment, without being properly deactivated before removal. SharePoint still has a reference to the feature, so it tires to activate the feature. But because it doesn't exist anymore, it will skip the feature.

Last week I ran into a tool which can scan your environment for such a "faulty feature". This tool is called the "SharePoint Feature Administration and Clean Up Tool" and can be found on Codeplex.

When you have started the tool, it contains a button called "Find Faulty Feature in Farm", which starts the scan for faulty features.

Have fun with this great tool!

[MOSS/WSSv3] Content Deployment/StsAdm export/import issue

[SITUATION]
At a customer the developers created a custom solution that displayed image in a picture library on a page and used the image title to overlay across the image. If the image title would be empty, the solution would use the site title. The solution worked fine on our staging environment.

We use Content Deployment to deploy the sites from the staging environment to a live environment. On the live environment, the overlayed text suddenly became the picture name instead of the picture title.

[ISSUE]
After some troubleshooting it turned out that Content Deployment deploys the site just fine from staging to live, however when an image title field is empty, Content Deployment populates this field with the image name! After performing some tests we discovered that this behavior is also occuring when:

• Deploying a document with an empty title. The document name is used.
• Using stsadm export/import to deploy the site instead of Content Deployment.

[CAUSE]
We raised a support call at Microsoft, but although they were able to reproduce the issue they are not going to fix this. According to "internal resources" this behavior is "by design". We could raise a design change, but that would probably be denied because other customers would deliberately use this behavior.

[SOLUTION/NEXT STEPS]
In this situation we had to modify our code to check if the title field is empty OR equal to the image name. Although this workaround works, we do not believe that this behavior is by design. When creating a "backup" using stsadm export and "restore" with stsadm import, you would expect no data to be changed in that process..........

[MOSS/WSSv3] Mergecontentdbs change

I have used the STSAdm operation MergeContentDbs many times in the past. But since I heard of the bug in this operation I temporarily stopped using it.

Fortunately the bug was fixed in the April Cumulative Update. So this weekend I moved some larger site collections to their own database and then I ran into an issue I didn't experience before:

MergeContentDbs used to copy the content to the new database and remove it from the old database to free up the data. However this time the amount of free space in the database did not change! Searching the Internet revealed a change in functionality of the operation.

"If a site collection is very large, an attempt to delete the site collection from a Web application fails. This causes the stsadm -o mergecontentdbs command to fail when you try to move site collections from one content database to another. This issue is resolved by adding an optional -gradualdelete parameter to the stsadm -o deletesite command. If this parameter is present, SharePoint marks the site collection as deleted to prevent further access while a SharePoint Timer job gradually deletes the data in the site collection. After you install the hotfix package that this article describes, the stsadm -o mergecontentdbs command uses this gradual delete functionality by default."

To remove the data from the database you can do two things:

1. Run stsadm -o databaserepair to remove all orphans
2. Wait until the daily timer job "Site Collection: Delete" runs, most of the times during the night.

- mergecontentdbs gotcha
- Article updates for the April Cumulative Update