Should content be searchable when still not approved

[viralshah]

Hi,
I am a newbie on Alfresco. Trying the buit in "review & approve" advanced workflow. Suppose User A creates a content and initiates the advanced workflow and sends the content to user B for approval.
Now till the user B approves the content, should any other user C be able to search and locate the content ?
I tried this scenario and found that user C is very much able to search and even check out the content. Is this behaviour correct ? What should be done if we want to prevent the content from being searched till it is approved ?

[mrogers]

The simple answer is that the search results depend on the search query.    And if it is a simple query like all files containing the word "sausages" then there's nothing in that query to say and don't return any documents which are subject to an approval process.

I had a quick look at the review and approve workflow and it is a very simple example workflow.   However if you wanted to you could extend it add more buisness rules to, for example, changes the access control of the document being reviewed so that user C can't see it until it is approved or add some properties to the document which userC can query against.

[buurd]

Isn't the answer that all not all properties and content is searchable by the search-textbox and advanced search in the standard GUI? Therefore one solution could be to configure another content-type and only give that contenttype properties that are not used by the searches the standard GUI provides.

It doesn't protect from all kinds of queries that you could define in a javascript but should sheild you from those the standards gui makes. It probably have a couple of other drawbacks too.

//Roland

[invictus9]

You need to think "accessibility" – a document that has not been approved is not accessible to anybody outside of the editorial cycle. You implement accessibility rules using the security model of Alfresco.

Therefore, put draft documents into a space that is restricted to the editorial group. The final stage of approval is to copy/move the approved document to a place that is more public, and will appear in the results of searches.