SharePoint Item Event Receivers and Site Creation

Question

I have created an Item Event Receiver for a document library and I have test that the logic works correctly and it all does. The next thing I wanted to do is automatically create the list when a site is created so I added the list to the ONET.xml file for the site:

<Lists>
  <List Title="Documents" Description="Documents " url="MyDocumentLibrary" Type="10002" FeatureId="CFD8504D-70EB-4ba2-9CCB-52E38DB39E60" QuickLaunchUrl="Docs/AllItems.aspx" />
</Lists>

And I ensure that the feature for this list is also activated be adding the feature to the

<WebFeatures>
  <Feature ID="CFD8504D-70EB-4ba2-9CCB-52E38DB39E60" />
</WebFeatures>

The problem occurs after I create the site, when I add a document to the list the Item Event Receiver does not run. However if I manually for to the web site features and deactivate and then reactivate the feature the Item Event Receiver does run. It seems that when creating a list through the ONET.xml and activating the feature it does not bind the Item Event Receiver to the list. What is the work around for this? Is this a bug?

Answer 1

This is probably a problem with site provisioning order. Specifically, the web feature is being activated before the list exists.

Answer 2

In the code snippet i could see that you the Custom List Type Type="10002" in that case you can easily associate the Event Handler to the List using another feature that has the following item in the Element Manifest XML

<Elements xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/"&gt;
<Receivers ListTemplateId="10002">   
 <Receiver>
  <Name>AddedEventHandler</Name>
  <Type>ItemAdded</Type>
  <SequenceNumber>10000</SequenceNumber>
  <Assembly>full assembkly</Assembly>
  <Class>Class of the event handler</Class>
  <Data></Data>
  <Filter></Filter>
 </Receiver>
</Receivers>

1. Also note that the above feature needs to be Web Scoped
2. All the List that are created based on the Type 10002 will have this EventHandler plugged to them
3. I have been doing this and it works, No race condition