entwicklungsgedanken » feature

Enable-SPFeature does not trigger the feature receiver

Eric Bartels — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 10:19:01 +0000

Today I encountered the same problem as stated in a blog post by Christopher Maish. When activating the feature via powershell the associated feature receiver was not called.

Trying the suggested solution in the blog post drove me to the cause of this problem. When using stsadm I got an “access denied” error.
I did run my script via Powershell ISE within Windows Server 2008.

So the real problem is caused, again, by UAC (User Account Control). When starting the Powershell ISE with “Run as administrator” and executing the script the feature receiver is now called as expected. Even when using Enable-SPFeature!

Inconvenient class-naming with feature receiver and scope=”Farm”

Eric Bartels — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 00:36:20 +0000

Writing feature receivers during SharePoint customizing a common task. Depending on the scope your features belongs to your code looks similar to the following:

public override void FeatureActivated(SPFeatureReceiverProperties properties)
{
  // Scope="Web"
  SPWeb web = properties.Feature.Parent as SPWeb;
 
  // Scope="Site"
  SPSite site = properties.Feature.Parent as SPSite;
 
  // Scope="WebApplication"
  SPWebApplication app = properties.Feature.Parent as SPWebApplication;
 
  // Scope="Farm". Does not work
  SPFarm farm = properties.Feature.Parent as SPFarm;
}

Farm != SPFarm

So the last line in the example code does not work. The variables farm is always null.

Here comes the great “SharePoint-naming-convention“… The class to get a farm-context is named SPWebService!

public override void FeatureActivated(SPFeatureReceiverProperties properties)
{
  // Scope="Farm". Works!
  SPWebService farm = properties.Feature.Parent as SPWebService;
}

Setting the MasterPage during feature activation sometimes works but not always?

Eric Bartels — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 11:53:08 +0000

One of my current projects had the requirement to modify certain properties of the SharePoint “Look and feel”.

To make updates and improvements easy I created a custom masterpage which is provisioned via a Feature. A custom feature receiver takes care of setting the masterpage and a feature staple takes care of newly created webs.

Strange things

This works well … Well mostly. In some existing webs my custom masterpage is simply not attached.

Solution

If you set the SPWeb.MasterUrl do not forget to set the SPWeb.CustomMasterUrl, too!

// web = SPWeb
web.MasterUrl = "myPath/to/my.master";
web.CustomMasterUrl = "myPath/to/my.master";

Now my masterpage is attached and used as desired.