Many time you will run into a situation where you will save a list and/or library in SharePoint as a template. After saving list/library as template you may want to change some of the settings e.g. You saved document library as template which had Major Versioning enabled. Now you want to turn minor versioning enabled as well.
One way to handle this is to make change in the document library and save it again as a template again.
I am going to show you how you can actually modify the existing library template and re-upload it again. Following are the steps.
Note: In this example I have saved document library as template and I am going to change Versioning setting on library level.
1) Download the Document Library Template from the list template gallery and save it to local drive e.g. C:\Temp
2) All list templates are CAB files so you can simply rename list template (STP) file to CAB file.
3) Now that you have CAB file extract the CAB file that will give you manifest.xml file.
4) Open manifest.xml file in Visual Studio for editing. For enabling major and minor version in document library template make sure you include VersioningEnabled and EnableMinorVersions properties and set them to TRUE. Here is the example:
<List Name=”{CB2342B1-0650-4059-857E-F8916A954C70}” Title=”Documents” Description=”This system library was created by the Publishing feature to store documents that are used on pages in this site.” Direction=”0″ BaseType=”1″ FeatureId=”{00BFEA71-E717-4E80-AA17-D0C71B360101}” ServerTemplate=”101″ Url=”Documents” VersioningEnabled=”TRUE” EnableMinorVersions=”TRUE” MajorVersionLimit=”0″ MajorWithMinorVersionsLimit=”0″
5) Once you make the change save the file. Now you are going to reverse engineer to create new CAB file from scratch. We will use MakeCAB.exe for this.
6) First open a NotePad and paste the following code in it.
OPTION EXPLICIT ;
.Set CompressionType=MSZIP ;
.Set Cabinet=on
; Destination Folder
.Set DiskDirectory1=c:\Temp
; File name for the new cab file. This will be your List Template name.
.Set CabinetNameTemplate=SharedDocuments.cab
; Files to be added are listed below
c:\Temp\manifest.xml
7) Save file as docTemplate.ddf and then run the following command to create CAB file.
makecab /f c:\Temp\docTemplate.ddf
8) This should give you your CAB file. Next step is to simply rename the CAB file to STP and upload it back to list template gallery.