SharePoint Dragons

We remember, a long time ago, when we were working on a chapter for an MS Press Administrator Companion book, we were reading one of the other chapters and it mentioned a thicket file. We re-read it, baffled, and the sentence still said thicket file. We later found it that this is a pretty common reaction to thicket files. We looked it up and found out a thicket is an Office doc saved as a web page. Every time you save a file as HTML that contains contains resources that can’t be stored within HTML (such as images) these get stored in a special linked folder called [file name]_files.

When you save a thicket in a SharePoint library, the special linked folder gets hidden. Also, SharePoint “protects” this type of folder by preventing you from creating folders that end with either _file or _files. In such cases, it appends an underscore (_) and renames the folder name to either _file_ or _files_:

Another thing to note about the combination of thicket file/SharePoint is that it’s not easy to copy or move them. Renaming or deleting the html file won’t affect the special linked folder and if you use the object model to rename it (using the MoveTo() method) you’ll get an error message saying you can’t copy or move a thicket file. A work-around exists and it’s described here: http://sharemypoint.wordpress.com/2007/07/24/_files-folder-part-2-you-cannot-copy-or-move-a-thicket-file-how-to-rename/