Enhancement: Add option to push Content Type changes to children

When using the spo contenttype set command, the changes are not pushed to child contenttypes if you execute them on site level.

The purpose of this issue is to add a flag --updateChildren to force the changes to be saved to the child types.

Option	Description
--updateChildren	Use this flag to update child content types as well.

Additional Info

With the REST Api we can use the Update function on Content Type level to do so:

/_api/Web/ContentTypes('0x01')/update(true)

Pushes the changes on the content type to the children.

Update: the update(true) function cannot be used as far as we can see. We’ll be switching this command to use the older list.svc API.

[martinlingstuyl]

I think we’d best conform to the way this is handled in other places: only push the current changes. We’d need to add a big note to the docs of course.

• It’s in the documentation: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/office/developer/sharepoint-2010/ms442695(v=office.14)#considerations-when-updating-child-content-types
• CSOM (and PnP PowerShell of course) handles it the same way
• I think the MS Graph handles it the same way. (slight assumption)
• The UI handles it the same way.

I’m sure that the /Update(true) REST API endpoint can be used in the same way. We just don’t know how precisely. Posting a regular JSON body does not do anything.

In the meantime I’ve asked a lot of people at Microsoft how the Update(boolean) function in the SP REST Api works. The conclusion is that nobody knows for real sure, but that it seems the Update function is not really supported in the REST Api. It’s like it’s generated based on the availability of the code for CSOM. It seems like you cannot use it in the same way as with CSOM.

In short, I’ll be updating the command to use the older API.

[Adam-it]

great job @martinlingstuyl 🤩 I think we may go with the older API /_vti_bin/client.svc/ProcessQuery 🤔 There are already places that it is used I think 🤔 different approach would be to wait maybe for the v2 to support all properties 🤔