SharePoint: Showing Last Published Version to Authors

Quick 5 minute post! Hope it helps!

Recently, our content authors wanted to see the most recent published version without going to Version History. Unfortunately, they hate to use SharePoint’s Version History and let me mention – they hate the ribbon too .

Anyways, they were okay with a button put in the side bar of the page which can only be displayed to Authors. And they wanted to view the page in a new window so that they can compare with draft version (thank god, they were okay with comparing the content manually )

Rather than accessing the versions on server side, we decided to access the version information only when a button is clicked. Once again the wonderful Client Side Object model saved a lot of work for us. The script on click of button would look this (and that’s it for today)

this.ctx = SP.ClientContext.get_current();
this.page = ctx.get_web().getFileByServerRelativeUrl(window.location.pathname);
ctx.load(page);

ctx.executeQueryAsync(Function.createDelegate(this, this.ShowVersion), Function.createDelegate(this, this.ShowError));
function ShowVersion() {    
    var versionID = page.get_uiVersion();
    if (versionID < 512)
    SP.UI.Notify.addNotification('This page was never published.', false);
    else if (versionID % 512 == 0)    
    SP.UI.Notify.addNotification('You are currently viewing Published Version.', false)
    else{
    window.open(window.location + '?PageVersion=' + 512*(versionID % 512), '_blank')
    }
        
}
function ShowError() {
    SP.UI.Notify.addNotification('Unable to perform the action. Please report the issue.', false)
}