Friday, January 18, 2008

Avoid checkin when uploading files

When uploading files to SharePoint they sometimes are left in checked out status. If the users don't checkin files after upload, other users cannot see the files.

This can happen even for Document Libraries without versioning - and changing it to avoid checkin is not simple.


You need to ensure at least that:
  • Require documents to be checked out before they can be edited = false
  • No versioning af Document library - probably not required
  • Ensure no mandatory columns exists - or ensure they have default values

Check out this blog for information.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I had a client that wanted this exact behavior. They wanted to require check-out before editing a document and wanted versioning enabled, but still wanted to be able to have all files "automatically" checked in when a user added a document to the document library via the standard SharePoint UI, the Windows Explorer View of the document library, and the Office 2007 applications.

We tried everything on thins, including developing custom event handlers and workflows to automate the document check-in process but to no avail. We eventually had to get the Microsoft SharePoint development team involved. Their final assessment was that, "It is not possible to suppress the out-of-the-box check-in mechanism and that any modifications attempting to do so will lead to a scenario where SharePoint is no longer supported by Microsoft."

It should be noted that the order of the events that fire when a document is added to a SharePoint document library is slightly different depending on which mechanism (standard SharePoint UI, the Windows Explorer View of the document library, Office 2007 applications) is used.

There is a way to conduct a bulk check-in of documents via the "Site Content and Structure" administrative functionality, but this is probably to advanced for most casual, day-to-day users.

My suggestion is to really work with your end users to see if they truly need check-in/check-out enabled for their documents.

Hope this helps.

Morten Marquard said...

We actually managed to get this working. The challenge was that some fields was hidden - but still required (as we set them programmatically in an event handler). When we set these fields to not required things started to work just as we expected.

What is strange is the fact that even if a value is provided for the field we have one client where documents are checked in - and another client where documents are not checked in.

So SharePoint is not consistent - or we couldn't find the difference between the installations (we compared all settings in SharePoint UE as well as using a custom tool to inspect settings - so far no changes).

Anonymous said...

It is great to know this! Thanks.
However my concern is that in your suggestion, there are some flaws if we kick on Sharepoint security police.
There are some solution though, like Sharepoint Batch Check In(http://www.sharepointboost.com/batch-check-in.html) which seems do a great job.
Anyway, your solution helps me a lot since my company does not care much about security.

Krishna said...

I would like to know how to set the content type fields to not required. This field has type as 'file', Status as 'Required' and Source as 'Document'.
I am submitting infopath form to the sharepoint list.
Please do reply.
Thanks
krishna