SharePoint Error while Updating or Inserting Items in List

SharePoint: “One or more field types are not installed properly. Go to the list settings page to delete these fields.”

This is a really frustrating and annoying error when you are updating or inserting records into SharePoint from your code
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Recently, I ran into this error “One or more field types are not installed properly. Go to List settings page to delete these fields” when trying to access and update one of the List in SharePoint 2010 through code.



SharePoint – One or more field types are not installed properly. Go to the list settings page to delete these fields.

Lots of debugging and then later, I found that the issue is due to the internal name of the column in List. This error is encountered when the internal name of the List’s column does not match with the field name we have used while building our XML batch.

Now you may be wondering about finding the internal name of the columns?

No more wondering guys:

It is very easy to find internal name & I will be guiding you to find it. For checking or finding the internal names of the columns, you need to go to “List Settings” and then hover over the column whose internal name you want to check. A link will be displayed at the bottom left side of your browser.

In that link, you can check for Field as shown below:



A small snippet for demonstration:

batchUpdate.Append("<Method ID='" + count + "' Cmd='New'>");
batchUpdate.Append("<Field Name='Description'>" + HttpUtility.HtmlEncode(job.Description) + "</Field>");

In the above snippet, the field name we are using is “Description” and the internal name is also “Description“. So it won’t throw any errors. Whereas, if we have the internal name as “Desc” and are using filed name as “Description” while building the XML then it will definitely throw an error.

Note: We are building XML batch. So that it can be passed to “UpdateListItems” web service. Which will further insert or update the List items.

Conclusion

Internal name = “Description” & Field name = “Description” = No Error
Internal name = “Desc” & Field name = “Description” = Error

Once you have checked that all your internal names matches with the field names in XML batch, you can go back to the SP site you were trying to access and you should no longer get that error message “One or more field types are not installed properly. Go to List settings page to delete these field”.

In case if the issue still persists, please comment below. I will try to help you as soon as possible. Meanwhile, you can check out other SharePoint articles.

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