Updating a record from an event receiver and a workflow

Question

In my situation, I have records being added to a record center that are immediately declared as a record. There are some fields that are associated with these list items that I need to be able to update from an event receiver and from a workflow.

Short of un-declaring & re-declaring the record, what alternatives do I have to updates these fields for each of the list items? Where else could I store these fields?

Answer 1

The SharePoint object model provides a supported way of updating a record without unlocking it. There's a guide here that describes some of the relevant information. I was able to get a working example (excuse some of the 'basic' naming) in an ItemUpdated event receiver.

SPSecurity.RunWithElevatedPrivileges(delegate()
{
    using (SPSite site = new SPSite(properties.SiteId))
    {
        using (SPWeb web2 = site.OpenWeb(properties.Web.ID))
        {
            SPListItem item = web2.Lists.GetList(properties.List.ID, false).GetItemById(properties.ListItemId);

            Records.BypassLocks(item, delegate(SPListItem newItem)
            {
                newItem["Title"] = "Hello from code";
                newItem.Audit.WriteAuditEvent(SPAuditEventType.Custom, SPAuditEventSource.ObjectModel.ToString(), "<Data>Audit text</Data>");
                newItem.SystemUpdate(false);
            });

        }
    }
});

As usual with SPSecurity.RunWithElevatedPrivileges, you must create new SPSite and SPWeb objects, as well as a new SPListItem object otherwise you end up with the error Attempted to perform an unauthorized operation.