Are Tables supported in PnP Site Templates?

Question

Hello,

I have created a SP 2016 site that I want to use as a template for PnP Provisioning. On the home page of my site I edited the page and created a table that I am using to create a 2-column page layout. In each column I added a couple of web parts and configured them. When I view the page in the site it looks correct and my web parts appear as expected in either the left or right-side column.

I then generated a site template using the command:

Get-PnPProvisioningTemplate -Out "PnP-Provisioning-File.xml" -Schema V201508

NOTE: For whatever reason I had to use the older version of the schema (based on a post I ran across) because without that schema specified the template generation would fail.

Once I had the template file, I then ran the command:

Apply-PnPProvisioningTemplate -Path "C:\temp\PnP-Provisioning-File.xml" -ClearNavigation -IgnoreDuplicateDataRowErrors

This command executed successfully and did not show any errors. However, when I accessed the site where the template was applied, the landing page showed all the web parts, but no table. All the web parts were shown, but in a single, vertical layout, one above the others. There was no table on the page with the two columns.

Is it not possible to include tables in a template to allow for very simple page layouts?

Thanks

Answer 1

Hi @Rene Wagner ,

Per my test, I could reproduce your issue on my SharePoint 2016. It seesm to be a bug when generating template for the wiki page layout.

I check the template.xml file, the layout shows incorrectly in the file. It should be TwoColumns instead of OneColumn.

So I change the Layout to TwoColumns, and change the webparts column from 1 to 2. This would work.

For this issue, I would suggest you submit new issue in the github: https://github.com/pnp/powershell/issues

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Answer 2

Interesting ... that makes sense. When you ran your test, did you explicitly specify the schema like I did?

I did some more testing and it appears that the issue may have been caused by the schema. One of the reasons I (thought) I had to use the schema is due to an error related to "types" that I had when I originally tried to generate the template file. Adding the schema resolved the error ... but this is an old version of the schema. Long story short, it turns out that my original error was not due to the missing schema, but because I was running PnP on one of my SP Servers, and so it seems there was a module/DLL version conflict between PnP and SharePoint. I finally ended up running the PnP commands from a non-SP server/host and from there I was able to run without specifying a schema version (which means it should default to the latest).

When I ran it this way, I was able to generate an XML template file that did properly extract/apply the template to a new site. Also, I found that when I generated a PNP file instead of a XML, that generated the proper layout. So it may be that the issue was caused by a bug in the (old?) schema version.

When I To add to this, what I also found is that if I generate a PNP file instead of an XML file using the command:

Get-PnPProvisioningTemplate -Out "c:\temp\PnP-Provisioning-File.pnp"

then it pulls both columns and properly applies them and locates the web parts as expected when I apply the template.