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It has been too long that I've been sucking the knowledge off of everyone else and not posting my own discoveries for others to benefit from. So here goes.

One of my clients has about 40 choice fields for one of their lists and rather than creating a feature I decided to just use PowerShell to add the fields to the list. I need to review the out of the box form with the client and rather than spend the time to build the feature, I'm building the list in my development environment so I can review it with them before I spend the time to build it.

The one key thing I found is that it only worked if I did the following (which isn't completely obvious)

• Create the field
• the field to the list
• Updated the list
• Retrieve the field from the list
• Add the choices for the SPFieldChoice field type and any other properties like the default value
• Update the field
• Update the list

Here's the PowerShell script. I've not done this from a .NET console app but I'd be interested if it behaves the same.

[System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("Microsoft.SharePoint")
function AddField
{ param ([Microsoft.SharePoint.SPList]$spList, [string]$fieldName)
$spField = new-object Microsoft.SharePoint.SPFieldChoice($spList.Fields,"Choice", $fieldName)
$spList.Fields.Add($spField)
$spList.Update()
$spField = $spList.Fields[$fieldName]
$spField.Choices.Add("No")
$spField.Choices.Add("Yes")
$spField.Choices.Add("Preferred")
$spField.DefaultValue = "No"
$spField.Update()
$spList.Update()
}
$siteUrl = "http://site"
$spSite = new-object Microsoft.SharePoint.SPSite($siteurl)
$spWeb = $spSite.OpenWeb($webName)
$listName = "Vendors"
$spList = $spWeb.Lists[$listName]
AddField -spList $spList -fieldName "Antenna Repair"