Future publication
Another frequently occurring situation occurs when a document is created but should not be released to its intended audience until a specific date and/or time in the future. Examples of such situations are a change to a procedure that must occur on a future date or the announcement of a contest winner. In the first case, the new procedure must be developed and approved in advance so that it will be ready for release far ahead of the date when users should see it. In the second case, perhaps the winner of a customer giveaway has already been selected, but the announcement of the winner is set to coincide with a future press release or industry event.
It can also be that an author has created a document that must be released on a specific date when he or she will be on holiday. It would be convenient to configure the document to automatically publish on that date without further effort.
Hyper.Net provides the special publication metadata value PublicationDate for this purpose. This metadata value is not referenced in a document type profile because it would not make sense to associated a static publication date with a group of documents as time goes on. You can, however, add this value to your content type forms using the procedure described in Copying standard publication metadata to a custom content type. For example:
Once the PublicationDate metadata has been added to your content types, you have three choices (configuring this option is a standard SharePoint task not shown here):
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Make it required: The author must enter a date/time specifying the publication date for the document. The document will be automatically published at the given time.
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Make it optional: If the user enters a date/time setting, the document will be automatically published at the given time. If no value is provided, the document will publish immediately.
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Make it hidden: The user will not see the property and will not be able to enter a value. You can, however, add additional programming that will automatically calculate and set the date when the document is saved.
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Note
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If the document is published with a future publication date and the author modifies the document and saves it again, the existing future publication request is deleted. The new publication request (which may or may not specify a future publication date) is then sent to the Request Queue.
If no PublicationDate is found for a document or if a supplied value is in the past, the
check-in/save date is used as the publication date.
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Tip
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Transformation requests in the Request Queue that are pending execution on a future date are found in the Pending Future view:
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