The Content Type Hub and Document Set Views

The Content Type Hub and Document Set Views header image

Using the Content Type Hub can be a great way to centralize management of content types. In a recent scenario I found myself working with a large number of content types that came from the Content Type Hub. Especially a set of content types that derived from the Document Set content type. During this encounter I got a fairly easy request: set different views for different libraries and in the document sets.

Document Set Views

When working with Document Sets you have some great options to tweak the welcome page, as well as some advanced settings. And Luckily  all those advanced settings you can set are pushed by the content type hub. So settings like the available content types, or the welcome page are all propagated correctly. Yet one of the questions was to set a different view in the document set than on the library itself. Having worked with the document set before I just went straight into the document set settings and tried to set the default view. In any given scenario you would see a dropdown that allows you to select from the available views.

However any content type that gets pushed by the Content Type Hub is set to read only. A read only content type cannot be changed, and neither can the document set. So when accessing the document set content type the only option you have is to make it editable again by disabling the read only option. Therefore you cannot change the welcome page view. Obviously you can still set different default views by the per-location view settings. This allows you to set a view for a specific folder. However as we do not know what Document Sets gets created you cannot use this approach to set a default view for the document set itself. So if a document set is pushed by the Content Type Hub you can no longer set a different default view for the document set. This might be something to keep in mind whenever a client asks you to do something with a Document Set that is propagated by the Content Type Hub.

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