Event Receivers and Content Deployment Jobs

SharePoint 2010 has many wonderful improvements over previous versions. One of which is a vastly improved Content Deployment mechanism and API.

If your application makes use of Event Receivers or Feature Receivers, these can, depending upon what they do, cause problems during a Content Deployment job. If you have code that you’d rather not execute when your event is triggered as a side effect of a Content Deployment job, you can use the SPImportContext object to find out if a job is running, and if so, to take alternative action.

Here’s an example on an ItemAdding Event Receiver (you’ll also need a using statement referring to the Microsoft.SharePoint.Deployment namespace)

/// <summary>
/// An item is being added.
/// </summary>
public override void ItemAdding(SPItemEventProperties properties)
{
    if (!SPImportContext.Current.IsRunning)
    {
        //TODO: add event receiver code here
        base.ItemAdding(properties);
    }
}

If you miss this out this check in an Event Receiver or Feature Receiver, you might cause deadlocks or spurious List Items that you did not intend.

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