Manny's SharePoint Blog

Forcing Document Check-Out in SharePoint Libraries



The issue: Two or more users opening a document for editing simultaneously. This can happen quite easily if users do not follow procedure and is likely to cause some headaches in large environments.

The solution: Easy… Build the procedure into the function so your users don’t have the option to ‘skip’ it.

We need to do two things, both in the ows.js – or customows.js if you have one - Always back-up before editing!

First, we must edit the original call to the editor (Office 2003 application).

Find the AddDoclibMenuItems function as shown below. We need to pass an extra argument, ctx.HttpRoot, to establish the origin when we make the call to editDocumentWithProgID2 function. This is necessary to perform the Check-out. Locate the line and edit as shown below.

function AddDocLibMenuItems(m, ctx)

{

...

strAction = "editDocumentWithProgID2('" + currentItemFileUrl + "', '" + currentItemProgId + "', '" + currentItemOpenControl + "', '" + ctx.HttpRoot + "')";

...

}



Next we analyse the Check-In and Check-Out function to determine how to implement it:

The call to Check-Out an item is like so:

NavigateToCheckinAspx('" + ctx.HttpRoot + "', 'FileName=" + url + "&Checkout=true')";

And the NavigateToCheckinAspx is like so:



function NavigateToCheckinAspx(strHttpRoot, strArgs)

{

SubmitFormPost(strHttpRoot + "/_layouts/" + L_Language_Text + "/Checkin.aspx?" + strArgs + "&Source=" + GetSource());

}

Thus, we can modify the editDocumentWithProgID2 function to perform the checkout before the item is opened. To do this, add the new argument we are passing to the function (strHttpRoot) and add the if statements below to the beginning of the editDocumentWithProgID2 function as shown:

function editDocumentWithProgID2(strDocument, varProgID, varEditor, strHttpRoot)

{

if (currentItemCheckedOutUserId == null)

currentItemCheckedOutUserId = itemTable.COUId;

if (currentItemCheckedOutUserId == "")

{

SubmitFormPost(strHttpRoot + "/_layouts/" + L_Language_Text + "/Checkin.aspx?FileName=" + strDocument + "&Checkout=true&Source=" + GetSource());

}

...

}

The Result: If the document is not checked out, it will automatically be checked out when the user elects to edit the item.