Forum Discussion
Parent and child content types
Hi guys! Our organization is about to switch platform from SP2010 to SP2016. Combined with this, we are also aiming at enhancing the document management process in SharePoint. Now to my question:
We want to produce a lot of content types for documents, where we start off with a parent content type with certain defined metadata columns, but these will be blank. From there we wish to create several child content types inheriting the columns, but with predefined metadata. For example; parent has "Document type" as a column, but no value, child has "Document type" set as "Policy". We have tried to do this, but run into problem when we edit the site column "Document type" for the child content type. The column in the parent content type is also changed to "Policy". How can we solve this? I hope there is an easy way around it, and I am eager to hear from you SharePoint-pros!
Sincerely, Per Sundin
We want to produce a lot of content types for documents, where we start off with a parent content type with certain defined metadata columns, but these will be blank. From there we wish to create several child content types inheriting the columns, but with predefined metadata. For example; parent has "Document type" as a column, but no value, child has "Document type" set as "Policy". We have tried to do this, but run into problem when we edit the site column "Document type" for the child content type. The column in the parent content type is also changed to "Policy". How can we solve this? I hope there is an easy way around it, and I am eager to hear from you SharePoint-pros!
Sincerely, Per Sundin
1 Reply
To get this outcome, create a separate Content Type for Policy that inherits from your custom parent document. You will then inherit all the required metadata attributes and use Policy to distinguish the type of document, not Document Type.
