We use the SharePoint Online Content Type Hub extensively as the central location to create, manage and distribute content types throughout our SharePoint Online tenant. We recently saw an issue with the distribution of one of the content types defined in the Content Type Hub which had a specific PowerPoint template assigned to it.
The content type in question had been updated with a revised template and republished, however when we tried to create a new presentation from the content type in SharePoint Online, the older template was still being served. I spent quite a long time testing a variety of PowerPoint template files of varying content and sizes with the content type (upload a new template to the content type in the Content Type Hub –> republish the content type –> wait for distribution to the site collections –> test; a process that can take some time when the content type is being distributed correctly) with no progress at all. It didn’t seem to matter what template file I uploaded to the content type, nothing seemed to be distributed. I even tried a blank Word template, and even that didn’t get distributed. Eventually I raised a Microsoft support case to help resolve the issue.
As the content type used managed metadata columns and I’d made a minor change to those, I tested with content types created using the same columns but a different template file and one using no managed metadata columns, but with what appeared to be the problematic template file uploaded. Only the example with the problematic template file was affected, but in the same way that we’d seen with the original content type, it didn’t matter what template file we uploaded afterwards, the content type and revised template were not distributed. The template we were using was obviously the issue, however it seemed to break distribution of any content type it was uploaded to from then on.
SharePoint content type templates are held in a folder structure in the root of site collections as follows:
_cts/<content type name>/<template file name>
This is true for both the Content Type Hub where the content types are distributed from, and the destination site collections.
Examining this location in the Content Type Hub (initially using PowerShell, but also using the SharePoint Client Browser), showed the following:
As can be seen, all of the template files that have been uploaded to the content type were still present! Uploading a new template file does not appear therefore to delete the previous file that was associated with the content type. If one of the uploaded files causes issues distributing the content type, even though it may not be associated with the content type anymore, it continues to cause issues simply by being present in the folder for the content type. For example the following PowerShell retrieves the template filename and URL associated with the content type:
Get-PnPContentType -Identity “Black Marble Presentation” | select DocumentTemplate,DocumentTemplateUrl
In our case, this demonstrated that the template that was causing the issue was not associated with the content type, except by its existence in the folder for the content type in _cts.
The following PowerShell could therefore be used to remove the extraneous template files from the content type folder in the Content Type Hub site collection:
Remove-PnPFile –SiteRelativeUrl “_cts/Black Marble Presentation/<template file name>”
Using the above PowerShell I removed all of the unused template files and then republished the content type with a simple blank Word template initially to test whether the content type was distributed successfully. Once that was shown to be successful I uploaded a revised PowerPoint template file and republished the content type. The revised template was also successfully distributed.
