How to display published date column in document library

Question

The scenario is there is a document library where user maintains major and minor versions of a document. When the user has to edit a document s/he checks out the document and starts their editing. When they think there editing is large enough they check-in back the document to the library as a major version. I want to display that check-in date column in the library.

I read some post and they mentioned that published date equals to modified date. But I believe that modified date could be anything when you do a minor change. For example, there is a responsibility column in document library if you change the person name there, SharePoint takes it as modification and update 'modified' column with the new date. Whereas I want the published date of the documents.

Is there any way to do this. I will really appreciate your help.

Answer 1

You are right that the Modified date applies to any change, such as a change to just metadata. So if you want to have a date field that is specific to when a document was checked in as a major version, you will have to either create a custom Calculated Column or use a generic date column and have users manually edit the date when the changes made are to publish a new major version and not just make minor changes.

Answer 2

You can't use modified data as it will have the date for every metadata change. This may seem like an overkill for such a simple requirement, but I think you will need to write custom C# code using event receiver attached to list which will update a custom date/time column with the published date value if you want automation . Something as mentioned in below code:

public  override  void  ItemUpdating(SPItemEventProperties  properties)
        {
            base.ItemUpdated(properties);
            using  (DisabledEventsScope  scope = new  DisabledEventsScope ())
            {
                SPListItem  listItem = properties.ListItem;
//add logic to check if the file version is major version or not and if its 
//major version , update the date column as below:
                int iBefore = (int.TryParse(properties.BeforeProperties["vti_level"].ToString(), out iBefore) ? iBefore : -1);
                int iAfter = (int.TryParse(properties.AfterProperties["vti_level"].ToString(), out iAfter) ? iAfter : -1);
                if(iAfter!=iBefore)
                {
                  listItem["PublishedDate"] = DateTime.Now; //change the column name as per your date column. Here, PublishedDate is a custom date/time column
                  listItem.Update();
                }
            }
        }

Reference - Identify Publish a Major Version in event receiver