Document submission (KD, Collab, custom portlets, etc)

Question

I'm investigating the process of submitting documents to the KD using an approval step and was hoping to get some feedback on how others do it.
Rather than post a laundry list of the problems I'm encountering I was hoping I could just explain my situation (slightly simplified).
We have 10 departments in the organization.
Each department has their own KD folder and 3 additional subfolders. (40 folders in total)
Each department has a document approver who can only approve for their particular set of 4 folders.
All users need to be able to submit a document for approval to any of the folders.
Maintaining our KD folder taxonomy is critical to us and we want to prevent approvers from adding/deleting folders.
I've attempted to solve this problem using collaboration and also with the KD Submit/Approval Utility & Edit mode however there were restrictions which prevented them from meeting our needs.
This process seems to basic and its so frustrating coming to dead ends with every approach I've taken.
If anyone can provide guidance I would be very grateful!
Thanks!
Geoff
Geoff Garcia
Producer, Enterprise Portal
March of Dimes National Office
914 997.4275
[email protected]

Answer 1

Hmmm. I wonder if this is a "bug" in the way collaboration sets the properties. There are two ways to set properties using the server API in the portal, setting the field value and overriding the value. My guess is that if the override value isn't set and the document is recrawled, the custom properties don't stay because they aren't repicked up from collab (maybe?).
Solution might be to read the field values from the API and set the override values before the re-indexing happens.
Here is some sample (untested) source for setting a property (non-override method is commented out):
IPTCard ptCard = session.GetCatalog().OpenCard(250, true);
String propValue = "sample value.";
IPTCardPropertyValues ptPropValues = ptCard.GetPropertyValues();
IPTCardPropertyValue ptValue = ptPropValues.GetItem(propId);
if (null == ptValue) { ptValue = ptPropValues.Add(propId); }                              
ptValue.SetOverrideValue(propValue);
//ptValue.SetFieldValue(propValue);
// if the index server isn't up, don't try to index, create the card
// and inform the user later
IXPPropertyBag statusBag = session.GetCatalog().GetSearchServerStatus();
SearchServerStatusInfo statusInfo = new SearchServerStatusInfo(statusBag, "INDEXSTATUS");
if (XPStringUtility.EqualsIgnoreCase(statusInfo.connectStatus,"OK")) {
     ptCard.SetCardSettings(PT_CARD_SETTINGS.PT_CARD_INDEXONSTORE, 1);
} else {
     ptCard.SetCardSettings(PT_CARD_SETTINGS.PT_CARD_INDEXONSTORE, 0);
ptCard.Store();
ptCard.UnlockObject();
If you this works it would be good to know at least, even though it would be a hack.