Documents and versioning

13 Jun
Posted on Author Anita 34

A nice part of document libraries and lists is the version history. Nothing new, we had it in MOSS 2007, but I previously never dived really into the version history by code.
Recently I did and discovered something that might help you out some time. 

Let’s get the files of the Shared Documents folder and get all the versions by code:

SPDocumentLibrary sharedDocs = SPContext.Current.Web.Lists['Shared Documents'] as SPDocumentLibrary;
resultBox.Text = string.Empty;
foreach (SPListItem doc in sharedDocs.Items)
{
      SPFileVersionCollection coll = doc.File.Versions;
      if (coll.Count != 0)
     {
          resultBox.Text += 'Versions of ' + doc.File.Name + Environment.NewLine;
          foreach (SPFileVersion version in coll)
          {
                resultBox.Text += 'VersionLabel: ' + version.VersionLabel + ' IsCurrentVersion: ' + version.IsCurrentVersion + Environment.NewLine;
          }
     }
}

 Nothing quite impressive, I used the file version collection and asked some of the properties from the SPFileVersion. Here’s the result:

Notice that version 5.0 is the currently published version and a draft version 5.1 is available too.
Now let’s take a look at the version history of the file at the document library itself:

 

Hey, there is another version: 5.2! Why does this file not show up by code? 

There is another approach to get all the versions, let’s use the versions of the list items instead of the files: 

SPDocumentLibrary sharedDocs = SPContext.Current.Web.Lists['Shared Documents'] as SPDocumentLibrary;
resultBox.Text = string.Empty;
foreach (SPListItem doc in sharedDocs.Items)
{
     SPListItemVersionCollection coll = doc.Versions;
     resultBox.Text += 'Versions of  ' + doc.Name + Environment.NewLine;
     foreach (SPListItemVersion version in coll)
     {
          resultBox.Text += 'VersionLabel: ' + version.VersionLabel + ' IsCurrentVersion: ' + version.IsCurrentVersion + Environment.NewLine;
     }
}

And the result:
 

Notice that all the existing versions, including the current version, are displayed. Also the sorting is the other way around compared to the listing based on the file versions. 

The conclusion here is that the SPFileVersionCollection only shows the versions, without the current version and the SPListItemVersionCollection shows all the versions, including the current version. 

Suppose you want to delete or put all the previous versions of a file to the recycle bin, you can easily use the SPFileVersionCollection option demonstrated above. This way you don’t have to exclude the current version from your deleting code as you would with the SPListItemVersionCollection option. 

Here’s an example of this:

SPDocumentLibrary sharedDocs = SPContext.Current.Web.Lists['Shared Documents'] as SPDocumentLibrary;
resultBox.Text = 'To recycle bin: ' + Environment.NewLine;
foreach (SPListItem doc in sharedDocs.Items)
{
     SPFileVersionCollection coll = doc.File.Versions;
     if (coll.Count != 0)
     {
          resultBox.Text += doc.Name + Environment.NewLine;
          doc.File.Versions.RecycleAll();
     }
}

The result of questioning the SPFileVersionCollection after this action:

The result of questioning the SPListItemVersionCollection after this action:

Notice that the current version of the file still exists after the recycle action. With the SPFileVersionCollection there is one version besides the actual current version, which is not listed here. This is because the actual current version is still a draft version.
With the SPListItemVersionCollection both versions are listed, the top one is the draft, the second the published version.

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  34. Hi Anita,

    Thanks for such blog, it gives all information. Here i have one some quetsion.
    1) can we delete current magor and minor version, so the earlier version can become current version.
    2) I only get this on this issue is that we need to restore previous version and need to create a new version.
    3) Is there a way to delete faulty version???

    Waiting for your response.

    Thanks,
    Heerak

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