Duffy Consulting, LLC

Error and Fix

When I attempt to activate a solution in SharePoint 2010 I get an error that reads “The ‘DisplayName’ attribute is not declared.” This error occurs when I save a site as a template and in the site I have a site column of type choice. For some reason when you add a column and make its type MultiChoice the wsp writer adds the attribute DisplayName.

<CHOICES>

        <CHOICE DisplayName="one">one</CHOICE>

        <CHOICE DisplayName="two">two</CHOICE>

        <CHOICE DisplayName="three">three</CHOICE>

      </CHOICES>

The DisplayName attribute is not part of the wss.xsd so when you try to activate the solution you receive an error.

I opened the wss.xsd from the system folder “C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\TEMPLATE\XML\wss.xsd” and made the following changes.

  <!-- added by Marcellus Duffy to fix the error -->

  <xs:complexType name="CHOICEDEF" mixed="true">

    <xs:attribute name="DisplayName" type="xs:string"/>

  </xs:complexType>

  <!-- end addition -->

  <!-- modified by Marcellus Duffy-->

  <xs:complexType name="CHOICEDEFINITIONS" mixed="true">

    <xs:sequence>

      <xs:element name="CHOICE"

                  type="CHOICEDEF" minOccurs="0" maxOccurs="unbounded"/>

    </xs:sequence>

   </xs:complexType>

  <!-- end modification -->

After saving these changes and doing an iisreset I was able to active the solutions with choice columns that were written by the save as template wizard.