Applies To: SharePoint

Versioning is a great feature in SharePoint but can cause administrators headaches when it comes to something like branding or other resource files. I’ve previously shown you how to automatically publish a major version and to approve documents as your solution deploys. In a perfect world you’ll never touch these files except through your solution.

However, sometimes you’ll need to quickly fix something or tweak something and you end up in a common situation: You can see the change but no one else can. This happens when versioning is turned on and you either haven’t published a major version (versions below 1) or the changes you’ve made are in draft state (ie 1.1 instead of 2.0).

Tracking these down can be frustrating since everything works for those with the right permissions. So here’s a quick view to add to your library to help you identify these problems. We’ll be filtering the library on 2 columns: Approval Status and Checked Out To.

First thing to do is to create a new view (I’ve named mine Unpublished). Choose whatever columns you want but some helpful ones are Type, Name, Modified, Modified By, Checked Out To and Version. You’ll also want to scroll down to the Folders settings and choose Show all items without folders.

You’ll notice that your view is now showing everything in a giant list because we didn’t apply any kind of filter. The reason for this is that the browser based view editor won’t let us select either IsNotNull as our comparison type or the Approval Status column. Fortunately, both of these things can be done very easily in SharePoint Designer. So switch to the Library ribbon and choose Modify in SharePoint Designer (Advanced) from the Modify View dropdown.

In the Code view just paste the following into your View’s XML inside the Query element:

<Where>
	<Or>
		<Eq>
			<FieldRef Name="_ModerationStatus"/>
			<Value Type="ModStat">Draft</Value>
		</Eq>
		<IsNotNull>
			<FieldRef Name="CheckoutUser"/>
		</IsNotNull>
	</Or>
</Where>

Things should look similar to this:

What our view is doing is showing any files that are checked out (so the CheckoutUser column is not blank) or that don’t have a major version. For whatever reason Microsoft won’t give you easy access to the _ModerationStatus column unless your library is requiring approvals, but we can still use it. When it’s set to Draft then it’s a minor version.

Save and refresh in the browser and you should only see those documents that may be causing you problems. Check them in or Publish a Major Version as needed and things should be good. We’ve found this simple view to be very helpful, hopefully you do as well.