I’m trying to figure out a clean way to hide a custom field type from the list of available columns when a user goes to add a new column to a list. I only want this field type to show up when a given feature has been activated (the feature could be site, web, or web app scoped for my purposes).
One theory (haven’t had a chance to try implementing this yet) is that I could set all the ShowOnListAuthoringPages (and similar) properties to “false” in the fldtypes_myfield.xml file, then programmatically set this value to true when a given feature is activated.
So, it does look like the only way to do really hide the field times is with attributes in the fldtypes_myfield.xml file. There are a series of properties that affect it’s visibility described in this MSDN page. In my particular case I ended up just using the UserCreatable property and marking it as false. This pretty much means the field type won’t show up in the UI anywhere, so you’ll need to make a feature or some kind of list/library template that you deploy that makes use of the type. I guess this is an area we can hope for improvement on in SP 2010 (perhaps along with a scoping mechanism for event receivers so they don’t have to be “global” in the farm).