Is it possible to change CreateDate and ModifyDate?

Hi, does anyone know if its possible to change the CreateDate and ModifyDate properties of a Node object using DocumentManagement.UpdateNode (or any other method)?

These properties of the node object are non read-only however trying to change them using updateNode doesn't seem to work.

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Ferdinand Prantl

I don't know. Those properties are maintained by Livelink and should not be tampered with in the usual scenarios.

I can remember a customer who wanted to have them unchanged after archiving Lotus Notes documents. (Our archiving makes changes in documents during their archiving.) We were able to convince the customer to let the system maintain those properties which are connected to the actual document changes. Instead, we introduced additional properties to store the last modification time of the docoment before archiving and adapted the views to browse the documents based on both property sets - mixing the archived and untouched documents in the expected order independently on changes done by our archiving service.

--- Ferda

Michael_Grantham

Thanks Ferda. We need to migrate existing documents from a fileshare into LiveLink and the customer obviously wants that the lastmodifiedDate and creationDate do not change.

I've noticed that I can change the creationDate using ObjectImporter, however it doesn't seem possible to do through EWS. Just wanted to know if I was missing something.

Ferdinand Prantl

I see. Livelink is not so flexible like Lotus Notes to reconfigure the default views to browse documents. I'm afraid that setting some attributes OriginalCreatedata OriginalCreatedBy, OriginalModifyDate and OriginalModifiedBy may not be an option for the customer but it is worth to try. If the customer does not need to sort by those fields in the browsing UI, they would help. It would be possible to base queries and reports on them. You could even provide an alternative UI which would recognize them. (For example, CLM Services can be configured to display them or the built-in ones.) And I've heard rumors that the Content Server 10 will be able to sort and filter by more than the current four attributes.

Otherwise I don't know a way how to tamper out-of-the-box. Updating a node by EWS is more restrictive than by LAPI. (At least the CreateDate is possible to change by UpdateObjectInfo. If the CreatedDate and CreatedBy properties were enough, you could help youself with LAPI.) If you really want to tamper with all those system properties, you'd probably have to write a server module with your own node-creating/updating method exposed either by a new WS or by a LAPI function.

--- Ferda