Hide Pending versions of draft from author

Question

SharePoint 2010

I want to hide Pending versions of a list item from the person who most recently edited the list item. My current setting is "Only users who can approve items (and the author of the item)"

I basically want to hide the item from the author, so only Owners can see Pending Versions.

This Sharepoint site is used to display news articles. Each article is an item in a List. Each article has fields like Article Body, Short Description, Category, etc.... User Comments are also field in the list (text with a separator between comments).

Versioning is turned on, and only Site Owners can see comments until they're approved.

If User A makes a comment on an article, no-one but site owners can see the comment until the List Item is approved.

However, if User B makes a comment before the List Item is approved, then the User A comment becomes visible to User B.

User B becomes an author of the List Item, and can see the Pending Version.

I need to be sure that User B will not be able to see the Pending Version - I want him to only see the Approved Version.

I have been unable to see a way to make Authors unable to see the Pending Version.

Answer 1

As I understand your question, comments are stored in a text field in the item. That may not be the best data architecture. What happens if User A's comment is not approved, but User B's comment is? How does that work in your scenario?

You may want to consider a different data architecture. Create a separate list for comments and use a parent/child relationship for creating and displaying comments.

The article can have a button to create a new comment and a list view of the comments filtered by the article's ID. The comment will inherit the ID of the main item as a key field.

That way each comment is an individual item and can be approved separately.

Such a scenario can easily be achieved with a little Javascript and customising the article form (or page layout).