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)

   1: /// <summary>

   2: /// An item is being added.

   3: /// </summary>

   4: public override void ItemAdding(SPItemEventProperties properties)

   5: {

   6:     if (!SPImportContext.Current.IsRunning)

   7:     {

   8:         //TODO: add event receiver code here

   9:         base.ItemAdding(properties);

  10:     }

  11: }

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.