"Discard a check-out" Option in Ribbon disabled

Question

We have a problem with the "Discard a check-out" option in ribbon.

The user checks out a page and without editing anything in the page, wants to discard the page by clicking the button which is placed "Files > Discard Checkout"

However, the button is disabled.

The user can edit, delete, check in or publish the page, but this option is disabled.

if the users goes to document library where the file is saved and click the (...) button which opens a context menu, the "Discard a check-out" option there enabled and the page can be discarded.

Why is this option in ribbon disabled?

Answer 1

This sounds like a bug but actually it’s performing correctly. Here’s my explanation: The issue relates to the library versioning settings, more specially the option “Require documents to be checked out before they can be edited”. With the wiki page library this option is set to No by default. Because of this you are actually editing the document without checking it out and since it is not checked out SharePoint disables the Discard Check Out command.

If you change the “Require documents to be checked out before they can be edited” option to Yes and edit the page you will be prompted to check out the document before you can make changes. Once you do this then you will be able to discard the check out from the ribbon.

The reason this is confusing is because certain types of page library will check out the page automatically so you can edit the page without the extra step of checking it out. The Pages library works this way.