Is it possible to have multiple draft versions?

[mariojsnunes]

I'm trying to create a version programmatically, every time an editor saves an item.
A new version is created only if the current latest is published, not if it's draft.
But I'd like to create new draft versions even if the latest is a draft.

I've tried with both
await contentManager.CreateAsync(contentItem, VersionOptions.DraftRequired); and
await contentManager.CreateAsync(contentItem, VersionOptions.Draft);
But the behavior is the same.

Edit: I'm on version 1.8.3

[Piedone]

No, not exactly like this, since this is not how OC's versioning is designed. However, there are a couple of workarounds you can look into:

• From a handler, when a draft is saved, publish it, then on the next line create a new draft and set the former published version as published (you can do this by setting the Published flag on the item directly, bypassing the content manager).
• If you don't need multiple draft versions, per se, and just want to see how the drafts changed, Audit Trail already records these. E:g. these below were all just draft changes, and under Details you can see the diff with the previous draft:

What's your use case, though?

[mariojsnunes]

It's an intranet where users can create articles. We provide our own UI, and users can't access the Orchard backoffice.
We already have a feature where users can see previous versions. But just this week a client asked us to rollback a draft version that had disappeared and this was the cause. (We used the audit trail to recover it as you mentioned)

The first option looks better for us, although it's a bit hacky :)
Thanks!

[mariojsnunes]

Been trying to make this work, still without success.

These were my assumptions:

1. "From a handler, when a draft is saved" means to use contentManager.SaveDraftAsync() and have a ContentPartHandler which overrides the DraftSavedAsync event.
2. Publish the draft - by setting Published to true and saving with session.SaveAsync.
3. Create a new Draft - tried with both contentManager and session.SaveAsync of the same contentItem
   i. Also tried setting the item id to 0 and generating a new versionId, before session.SaveAsync
4. Republish the original published version - by setting Published to true and saving with session.SaveAsync

For step 2, wouldn't want to use contentManager.PublishAsync as it would trigger other events.

Is this what you had in mind? Thanks!

[Piedone]

1. Yes. You can also check UpdatedAsync() in the handler, though that'll run on every editor update, including ones that resulted in a validation error, and that were part of a publish.
2. For the first (but not the second) publish, I meant with IContentManager.PublishAsync() but if it works then yes, just setting the flag is better to bypass and handler that we'd mislead.
3. You can create a draft with IContentManager.GetAsync(ID, VersionOptions.IsDraftRequired).
4. Yep.