I came across very nice feature Sitecore CMS is providing out-of-box. This might be very useful strategy while doing the content population/editing.

Here, I am trying to configure Content Management(CM) or say Content Authoring(CA) server to automatically create newer version upon editing the item. This whole exercise can be divide in to two steps :

Step 1: Configure Locking is requited for item editing

To do this, you may need to open the web.config and check below setting’s value is set to “true” on CA server. The default value is true.

<setting name="RequireLockBeforeEditing" value="true" />

Step 2: Configure auto-creation of version for item

To get this thing working, default workflow must be assigned to the item for which automatic version creation should be enable while editing. As a start, you can use the default workflow provided by Sitecore /sitecore/system/Workflows/Sample Workflow and if you have required workflow ready you can utilize that. If you planning to utilize sample workflow, please also consider reading my this post.

The best practice is to assign default workflow to template’s standard values. Have a look to below image for more details.

Tip: You may need to switch on the Standard Fields view form View Menu to see Workflow section.

Following code in WorkflowContext class of  Sitecore.Workflows.dll is actually responsible for creating version on editing.

public Item StartEditing(Item item)
{
	Error.AssertObject(item, "item");
	if (!Settings.RequireLockBeforeEditing || Context.User.IsAdministrator)
	{
		return item;
	}
	if (this._context.IsAdministrator)
	{
		return this.Lock(item);
	}
	if (StandardValuesManager.IsStandardValuesHolder(item))
	{
		return this.Lock(item);
	}
	if (!this.HasWorkflow(item) && !this.HasDefaultWorkflow(item))
	{
		return this.Lock(item);
	}
	if (!this.IsApproved(item))
	{
		return this.Lock(item);
	}
	Item item2 = item.Versions.AddVersion();
	if (item2 != null)
	{
		return this.Lock(item2);
	}
	return null;
}

All above works for non administrator users. By default, for admin user in Sitecore, they do not need to lock the item to edit so it does not triggers any workflow.

Happy Versioning…!!! 🙂