One of my project from recent times I was worked on content
hub to manage the content types in SharePoint. While changing the content type
name, I got an error saying that “The content type is in use” as shown
the image below.
I have checked all the content types in current site, I haven’t
seen any content type with the current name. By checking few blogs like mavention and
sympmarc I got the
reasons for this error.
There many reasons for this issue as listed below,
Content type still
exists in Site: Even we can’t see the content type in SharePoint content
type gallery, it may exists in Recycle Bin (Site Recycle Bin or Site collection
Recycle Bin). We have to remove the content type from Recycle Bin too. To remove
the content type from Site Collection Recycle Bin, we need to have Site
Collection privileges on Site Collection.
Other users might
have associated anywhere? There is another chance that other users might
have associated with the content type that we can’t see. We can see this behavior
in SharePoint document libraries. We can check this by navigating to SharePoint
Library settings and click on Manage Check out files. We can see the list of
items belongs to other users. If it ok, take the owner ship of the items and
check-in them.
Minor Versions: We have one more possibility that there are
some items may checked-in with minor versions in the List/Library. We have to
check the appropriate items and need to publish the items with major versions.
This may helps.