Failed to determine definition for Feature...

Published 27 August 07 04:04 PM | jannemattila 

I was working on SharePoint case and found myself staring at the logs... again :-)

I found 11 lines with "Failed to determine definition for Feature with ID..." and it was repeating quite often. And that error is something new for me... And if you have stared SharePoint logs for an year that's really amazing! Exact error messages were like this:

...
Failed to determine definition for Feature with ID '065c78be-5231-477e-a972-14177cc5b3c7'.  Skipping this feature for element querying consideration.
Failed to determine definition for Feature with ID '0806d127-06e6-447a-980e-2e90b03101b8'.  Skipping this feature for element querying consideration.
Failed to determine definition for Feature with ID '2510d73f-7109-4ccc-8a1c-314894deeb3a'.  Skipping this feature for element querying consideration.
Failed to determine definition for Feature with ID '00bfea71-dbd7-4f72-b8cb-da7ac0440130'.  Skipping this feature for element querying consideration.
...

So I searched (with Vesa Juvonen) those guids from 12\TEMPLATE\Features-folder and found out that those features were actually Enterprise Edition features (like Excel Services). MOSS "couldn't find" those features even if they were OOB features. The reason for this was actually quite understandable... since there was a site collection that has been moved from MOSS Enterprise to Standard. And in Standard you don't have those Enterpise Edition features available even you have those activated in you site collection. The lesson of this exercise was... don't mix and match editions :-)

Anyways... Happy hacking!

J

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Comments

# Grail said on March 27, 2008 3:50 AM:

Getting this error while trying to develop a custom workflow for WSS ... Have uninstalled and deactivated the features listed in the error ... Still erroring! Any ideas?

# alex talarico said on June 30, 2008 3:05 PM:

so... what's the resolution? :)

# David Lee said on July 1, 2009 10:02 PM:

Have you find the resolution for this question?

Can you tell me?

My e-mail is "davidlee198002@gmail.com"

thx.

# Jim Brocato said on July 29, 2009 10:59 AM:

The root cause of this error is that the Features table in the content database has an entry with the given GUID, but the Objects table in the Config database does NOT have a corresponding object with that ID.  

This gets caused by the following scenario: a solution with a feature gets deployed and activated to a site. The solution gets retracted without first deactivating the feature at the site level.  So, the site has an orphaned entry.

You can resolve this by running the stsadm -o deactivatefeature -id [guid from log] -url [each site it was activated on] -force.

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