Error Deleting a Content Type – “The content type is in use”
Are you as annoyed by this “The content type is in use” error as I am?
Error messages like this that don’t give you a way to solve the problem are a sign of the devil to me. That Correlation ID does us no good (try to find the administrator in a large organization to help you out in a timely way) and there’s no good way to find out where the Content Type is in use.
In many cases the Content Type may be in use with real content. However, in the instance where you are prototyping something and delete the list where you were using the Content Type, you know that it’s not in use anymore, right?
Well, it’s still in use, actually, but only sort of. When you delete the list, it goes into the Site Recycle Bin, so it actually still exists. It’s a great safety feature, but in this case, it’s getting in our way.
You need to delete that list from the Site Recycle Bin as well as the Site Collection Recycle Bin. The former is easy: you deleted the list so you have permission to delete it from the Site Recycle Bin.
The latter is only available to you if you are a Site Collection Admniistrator, so you may need to find someone who has that permission to help you out.
Once you’ve deleted the list from both Recycle Bins, you’ll be able to delete that pesky Content Type. Of course, you can also wait the requisite 60 days until the list is deleted from the Site Collection Recycle Bin automatically (by default – your settings may vary), but who will remember that far into the future? And we all know that a clean Site Collection is a good Site Collection.
Geez, never thought to look there… Thanks for the tip, it resolved my issue.
Hey Marc,
Great post. I encountered this recently when developing some kind of Content Type Management Tool. But there are more occasions that will cause this error. Just blogged about it : http://blog.octavie.nl/index.php/2012/09/14/error-the-content-type-is-in-use-explained/
grtz,
Octavie
A quick note:
With JS CSOM, if you use .DeleteObject(), the item will not go to either recycle bin and will not collect $200.00 either. Using .recycle() will however.
Cheers,
Matt
True. But if you’re just a plain old SharePoint user, you can easily run into this situation.
M.
Sorry it did not work form me….I deleted it containing documents.
once you delete it … go to administration and there in the recycle bin there is again another option to show “deleted from end user recycle bin” and you have to delete it again.
Thanks Marc. Only your solution works for me among millions posts around the internet.
Oliver:
Glad I could help!
M.
Excellent, This worked and is very simple to follow!
Excellent, in SP2016 (at least) in Recycle bin, there is also another link “second-stage recycle bin” and you have to remove the list there too !!