Versioning properties

This topic discusses several document class properties that are important to versioning.

Each document version is either a Major version or a Minor version and is automatically assigned a Major number and a Minor number. See Version numbering for more about how the Major and Minor numbers make up a document's version number. See What appears in a folder for details about which version of a document shows up by default in Enterprise Manager and applications such as Workplace. Also see Versioning actions to understand how actions like check out and promote determine the properties described in this topic.

For information about how security policies can be designed to automatically apply these changes of permissions on versions as they change from state to state, see the Security Guide's chapter on security policies.

This topic describes some of the properties essential to versioning:

These are all read-only properties which the Content Engine maintains.

Major version number

A Major version is one that

Released Major versions are typically designed to be available to a wide range of users. Access to Superseded major versions is typically more restricted, such as to a select group of authors and reviewers.

Major documents always have a Minor number equal to zero. For example, a document with a Major version number of 2, and a Minor version number of 0—sometimes displayed together with the Major number first, as in 2.0—is a Major version. See Version numbering.

If two level versioning is being used, the Major number will hold the current major version level of this document version series.

If single level versioning is being used, all versions of the version series will be Major versions. The only exception is that Reservations are always given a Minor number, which in single level versioning would therefore always be 1. As soon as the Reservation is checked in, the Minor number would go back to 0 while the Major number would be incremented by 1.

Minor version number

A Minor version is one that has not been approved and released as a Major version. The most recently checked in Minor version is marked In Process. There can be one and only one In Process version in a version series. Older Minor versions are marked Superseded, and there can be many Superseded versions. Access to Minor versions is typically restricted to a select group of authors and reviewers. Reservation documents—the editable document version created by a checkout—is always a Minor document.

A document is a Minor version if its Minor number is 1 or more (that is, not equal to zero). For example, a document numbered 2.1 has a Major version number of 2 and a Minor version number of 1 and is therefore a Minor version. See Version numbering.

If two level versioning is being used, the Minor number will hold the current Minor version level of this document version series. Versions that are Major versions (Superseded or otherwise) will have a Minor number of zero. Versions that are Minor will have some number other than zero for its Minor number.

If only single level versioning is being used, the Minor number will always equal zero, with the one exception of the Reservation as described above.

Version Status
The Content Engine provides four versioning states that are automatically applied by the Content Engine as a document's version series goes through various defined stages. These states are called Released, In Process, Reservation, and Superseded. Each of these four values can be associated with a security template, providing easy control over the permissions granted on the document as it passes into a particular versioning state.

These four version states are actually stored as integers and are sometimes displayed as integers by Enterprise Manager and applications such as Workplace:

These four text values ("Released", etc.) are associated with these integers by the Version Status Lookup Custom Object. You can edit this Custom object to change the strings to some other value. You could, for example, change "Released" to "Public version", or "In Process" to "In Progress".

For information about how security policies can be designed to automatically apply these changes of permissions to versions as they change from state to state, see Security policies in Help for Security.

Current Version
Current Version is a property which defines which version in a version series is the most recent version, other than the Reservation. (The Reservation cannot be the current version.) This value of this property is used by events, folder references, and other server or client-based processes that act on the latest version.
Reserved
Reserved is a property set on the current version when it is checked out. The term "Reserved" is meant to convey that the current version is no longer available to be checked out. Do not confuse with "Reservation", explained above. When the current version's Reserved property is set to True, there must also be another version that is the Reservation.