Routing Documents in Records Center

I recently was asked if the record routing rules in Records Center support inheritance relationships of content types. Namely, will a routing rule for a parent content type be applied to child content types. Answer is no.

Here is an example setup:

1. Create two site content types: Accounting Document and Project Accounting Document. Project Accounting Document is a child content type of Accounting Document.
2. Create a new Accounting document library in the Records Center.
3. Add a Record Routing entry in the Records Center to route Accounting Document to the Accounting document library (i.e. only the parent type).
4. Create and route an Accounting Document and a Project Accounting Document.

The Accounting Document routes via the rule to the Accounting document library. The Project Accounting Document ends up in Unclassified Records in the Records Center. So the parent Record Routing rule is not applied to the child.

A custom router (implementation of IRouter) could be written to implement this behavior. Here is a blog posting that outlines a custom router that gives an idea of how to do it:

https://blog.thekid.me.uk/archive/2007/04/15/creating-a-custom-router-for-records-center-in-sharepoint.aspx