With a SharePoint 2010 Publishing site, I was investigating to see if I could have a bunch of pages treated as a single unit – ie. Page-A, Page-B, Page-C and Page-D about a certain product.

That way, I could have the advantages of documents sets like a shared ‘versioning’ and ‘workflows’ and ‘permissions’ – they’re essentially just a new Content Type with some smarts included.

So – I tried the following steps – as would do with other document libraries :

• Activate the Site Collection feature for Document Sets (within Site Settings > Site Collection Features)

• Change to the Pages Library – and add the content type
• Within the Pages library – change to the “Library” tab
• Click “Library Settings” – and then “Advanced settings”
• Tick the box to “Allow management of content types
• Click “Add from existing site content types” – to choose the content type
• Change the dropdown to be “Document Set Content Types” – and click ADD – then OK

OK – so it looks like it’s alright, eh ?

And – when switching back to the Pages library – I can create a NEW item of Document Set type :

BUT – I then got an “Unhandled Exception” !!

I checked the server log (Event Viewer) – and noted that there WAS an exception :

Exception information:
    Exception type: SPException
    Exception message: Document Sets cannot be created in the Pages Library.

DOH !!   

Yes – I know that a Page is not really a “Document” – but everything is a “ListItem”, right ?   So I thought it might work.  

And – I think that SharePoint should have captured the SPException – not been ‘unhandled’.

Oh well – might have to find another to treat “many pages” as a single unit – perhaps a Site Workflow – and manage it that way ?!    Let me know if you have any ideas or discover an answer.

🙂

Some good news is that you CAN use Document Sets for Document Libraries within a SharePoint Publishing Site – so that a group of PDF’s (for example) can undergo the same grouping & functionality/features.

Just NOT for the Page Library itself.