Question

Metadata locked - document not checked out nor open

Version 8 Administration

Updated September 15, 2014

asked on August 25, 2014

We are experiencing an intermittent problem with some of our Acrobat fillable forms. The metadata becomes locked out even though the document does not appear to be checked out. Document users state that they did not use check-in/check-out. Nor can the document owner can do anything to correct the situation.

To resolve the issue, I (admin) have to right click on the document and select Check In-Check Out / Undo Checkout (the only available option - all others on the menu are inactive). The Admin console does not list the document as checked out nor does it show it as having any type of entry lock. In fact, I can edit the electronic vesion of the document without problem.

We run 8.3 client, admin, server. Some users do use version control on these documents (though not sure why). I have just started keeping a log on this issue. Any ideas regarding the cause of this problem?

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replied on August 26, 2014

Any update on this? I had a situation with a client on v9.0 that had entries that were not able to be changed via metadata that were actually having the Workflow for the Business process act on the entry before the entry was closed. this caused the entry to be marked as Checked out when viewing that entry in the folder view with the "Checked Out By" column visible, but no where else. Took me the longest time to figure out that's why it was happening. I believe in 9.1 they changed when an entry is locked, which has seemingly fixed this issue

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replied on August 25, 2014

Are workflows acting on them? Can you check on a document running into this issue if you display the checked out by property in the columns of the LF Client if you see it marked as being checked out even though it is not showing up as checked out anywhere else?

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replied on August 26, 2014

Thanks for your reply. Apologies on my delayed response - I wanted to check into the condition that you mentioned. I had, in the past, checked the Admin Console for check out status, but not the metadata fields in the Folder Browser.

Indeed, the Checked Out By column lists a user though Admin Console does not list the entry as checked out. I checked with the user, and he does not have the document open. One item that I noticed with previous occurrences is that the entry is listed in dbo.active_doc (SQL) with a checked out date/time stamp. Another way to detect the condition, I suppose.

I will look upstream in the flow to see where this might be occurring.

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replied on August 26, 2014

I was able to get this issue to reproduce 100% if I had a workflow that moves a document after a metadata change (that was already in progress from something else starting it) and not closing the document immediately, but instead just hitting "Save" after making the correct change of metadata to the document. See if that might be whats happening to you.

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replied on August 27, 2014

I think you're confusing two separate locks. Workflow couldn't generate the behavior described in the initial posts as it never checks out documents (using built-in activities). Workflow may lock the document with a write lock for short periods of time as it makes changes to it. In that case, you would still be able to open the document in the Client, but you would get an "Entry Locked" error when trying to save changes.

The Client implicitly checks out versioned documents when the user opens them, so that may have been causing the behavior you're seeing. There was a bug in the initial release of 9.0 where in some cases the checkout wasn't cleaned up, but that has been fixed as of 9.0.1.

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replied on September 15, 2014

Actually, both responses have been helpful. Looking at the metadata field 'Checked Out By' does help me identify instances of the problem. That said, the one initiator that is consistently associated with the problem also uses version control. However, we are on 8.3, not 9.0. I am not sure if this problem existed before 9.0 or not.

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