Sharepoint versioning omitting versions / automatically merging

Question

To anyones knowledge, does sharepoint somehow omit versions, or merge them, once they "repeat"?

I have a sort of linear approval workflow. Approver A fills in some data, changes the value in Workflow state from State A to State B, thus passing the item onto approver B. Approver B requires additional data, so he changes the Workflow state from State B to state A, passing the item back to approver A. Both these actions create proper item versions. However Approver A, the little dickens he is, just passes the item back to Approver B, without changing any other data, once again the only value that changes is Workflow State, from State A to State B. At this point the item version repeats itself, and Approver B will once again return the item back to Approver A, and with each next cycle, versions of the item start to "go missing", or they merge. Which actually makes some sense, because the approvers keep changing the item into the two same versions in a cycle...

Is this standard sharepoint behavior? If so, can it be somehow altered, like if I wanted to have a history of all the versions/cycles that these two made on the approved item?

I tried googling and reading up on version history, but the answer keeps eluding me...

Thank you kindly Peter

Answer 1

As far as I know, Sharepoint creates a new version of a document/page when anything is changed.

In an example below, I used a SharePoint page with versioning:

• Created a page, version 1.0
• My colleague added a Calendar web part, published the page, version 2.0
• The next day I added a new section, where I added 3 web parts, did not publish the page, saved it as draft, completed it in the evening and published, version 3.0
• My colleague did not like it and deleted whole section, version 4.0
• I restored version 3.0, but removed 2 out of 3 web parts and published it, version 5.0
• We had a discussion to start all over, so restored 1.0 and published, version 6.0. We also deleted all previous versions, actual and only version is now 6.0.

For documentation check this MSFT article.

You can also check The absolute basics of version history.