Office SharePoint 2007 out of the box has a policy framework, that can help with information management in your organization. On of the out of the box policies is the expiration policy. You can setup a policy for a site collection, content type of SharePoint List that will expire your item after a certain number of days, months or years after one of the date field values in your item. You can expire all whitepapers for example 5 years after they have been last modified.
The action to SharePoint will perform when the item expires depends on you, Out of the box there are 2 options: The items is deleted or a workflow is started. If a workflow is available for the content type or list, it will be listed in the dropdown.
It is also possible to create your own actions. After you have created and registered your action, it will show up in the “Perform this action” dropdown in the screenshot above.
Step 1 – Implement the interface
To create a custom action, you need to implement the IExpirationAction interface that can be found in the namespace Microsoft.Office.RecordsManagement.Features.
public class ExpirationSendWarning : IExpirationAction
{
public void OnExpiration(Microsoft.SharePoint.SPListItem item,
System.Xml.XmlNode parametersData, DateTime expiredDate)
{
// Do whatever you need to do with you item when it expires
}
}
You need to put this in a strong named assembly and add it to the GAC.
Step 2 – Create the registration xml
After creating the expiration action, you need to register it by creating an xml file. You will find an example below. The featureId attribute of the PolicyResource element is important. This needs to be the ID of the out of the box expiration policy. The rest is pretty clear. Save this xml to a file called “actionmanifest.xml”
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<p:PolicyResource id="TST.POC.PolicyFeatures.ExpirationSendWarning"
featureId="Microsoft.Office.RecordsManagement.PolicyFeatures.Expiration"
type="Action" xmlns:p="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:server:policy">
<p:LocalizationResources>dlccore</p:LocalizationResources>
<p:Name>ExpirationSendWarning</p:Name>
<p:Description>Sends a warning on the reminder date</p:Description>
<p:Publisher>Ton Stegeman</p:Publisher>
<p:AssemblyName>
TST.POC.PolicyOfTruth, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral,
PublicKeyToken=503edd7b21a430b3
</p:AssemblyName>
<p:ClassName>TST.POC.PolicyFeatures.ExpirationSendWarning</p:ClassName>
</p:PolicyResource>
Step 3 – Register the expiration action
The last step is to register the action. To do that, you run the example piece of code below from any type of application you like best:
string actionmanifest = System.IO.File.ReadAllText("actionmanifest.xml");
PolicyResourceCollection.Add(actionmanifest);
The PolicyResourceCollection can be found in the namespace “Microsoft.Office.RecordsManagement.InformationPolicy”. Both for step 1 and 3 you need a reference to Microsoft.Office.Policy.dll
