Routing Document Sets in SharePoint 2010

If you don’t want to know why but only how to route Document Sets you need to do the following:

1. Enabled the Document ID Feature for the Site Collection
2. Run the Content Organizer timer job

For those who are interested why then read on!

Having done some work with ECM in SharePoint 2010 one of the most commonly asked questions that I get asked is ‘Why aren’t my document sets been routed?”

It’s a common question because it actually involves a little bit more than it seems and if it doesn’t go well it just doesn’t work.

Firstly you need to obviously have Document Sets enabled for the Site Collection, to do that go to Site Collection Features and enabled the Document Set feature.

Now to set it up for routing you need to create a Records Center. The before you create a Content Organizer rule you need to first add the Document Set content type to the library that you want to route the Content to, in our case our Records Library.

You need to do this otherwise you will get the following error appear when you try to select the target location for a Content Organizer Rule:

Ok so now we add a rule for our Document Set. This is the same as for any other Content Organizer Rule:

1. Content Type: Document Set
2. Target Location: Where you want to send the Document Set to

Now when we look at the drop off library we see something interesting. By default when you add a Content Organizer rule SharePoint will also add the Content Type for that rule to the Drop Off library so that you can submit content types of that type to be routed. But if we look at the available Content Types there are now two instead of one:

The reason for this is that when SharePoint sends a Document Set to be routed it will first package it up as a zip file, then when it gets processed it will rehydrate the Document Set (with all content and landing page) and declare each item within as a Record.

Many people are deleting this Document Set (Packaged) Content Type from the Drop Off library or adding it to the Records Library. DO NOT DO THIS. Bad stuff happens

Ok so let’s gives this a go! So create a document set and send it to our Records Centre. We do that and we see that the Document Set is not in a zip format but still sits in the Drop Off library.. not cool.

Hmm ok so we know that there is a job called the ‘Content Organizer Processing’ job, so lets run that. By default this is set to run once per day so maybe that is why there is no routing love?

Still nothing However looking into the ULS Log (with ULS Viewer you need this thing) we see that we have an error message:

“The Persist ID field (Document Id Feature) is not present on the new item. Feature is not enabled.  Item URL: DropOffLibrary/My Document Set.zip, Exception: Column ‘_dlc_DocIdPersistId’ does not exist. It may have been deleted by another user.”

Interesting I assume that this means that we also need to have the Document ID feature enabled. Now I don’t know why but I am sure that there is a reason.

Ok se lets enable the Document ID Feature, we also need to configure it as well, so give it a ID and press OK.

NOTE: This is a issue with SP2010 that you can’t seem to configure the Document ID if you have more that one Site in the Site Collection. Will be posting about this soon.

Anyway now that we have the Document ID sorted out lets now run the Content Organizer job and see how we go!

Ok looks good the content was routed to the correct location. If we look inside our set how are the documents inside the set looking?

Awesome declared as records! Also if you try to edit the document set itself you will get this error message:

Which makes complete sense since you don’t want users editing the set, I think that MS forgot to include a padlocked icon for the Document Set content type but such is life!

So there you go, hopefully this solves a few issues!

Tags: document id, document set, ecm

Category: How To