Information management policy settings to Expire list items by it's Created Date

When I first used Sharepoints Information management policy settings I thought it would be easy to set an Expiration Policy on my list items. This seemed like a perfect fit for the requirement I was working on.

Was it Straight Forward? Yes and No.

But once I sorted out my issues I managed to quickly get it working. Firstly the reason I wanted to do this was because my client had a requirement to delete items in a list once they'd been there a couple of weeks. Easy I thought....

So I went ito the Settings Page of the List

Then I clicked on the Information management policy settings link.

I then selected Define a Policy.

On the following screen I checked the Enable Expiration box.

This gave me futher choices..... But the choice I wanted to select was greyed out! I wanted to select A time period based on the item's properties: ... but it wouldn't let me because I didn't have a date field to select from! This is when I started shouting "What about the Created Date" followed by "What about the Modified Date".

Once I'd calmed down I tried several ways to try and trick this policy by adding hidden fields to my list. It still didn't give me the desired result I was after.

So I needed a new plan....

So my attention turned to Site Collection Policies (Site > Site Settings > Site Collection Policies). This seemed like the way forward. Set a policy at the Site level and then select it from the List settings Information management policy settings page. But surely it will give me the same problem.... won't it?

When I clicked on the Site Collection Policies I got an Access Denied Error! So I started screaming - "I am a *#$%$#@ Site Collection administrator how can I not have access".

Well once I looked into it further I realised that I need some sort of permission to be able to access this page. So I decided to make sure I had all the available permissions assigned to my Web Application. I did this with the code below -

SPWebApplication WebApp = SPWebApplication.Lookup("http://MySitesUrl");

WebApp.RightsMask = WebApp.RightsMask | SPBasePermissions.FullMask;

WebApp.Update() ;

This can just as easily be done through the UI. See Gary Lapoints blog at - http://stsadm.blogspot.com/2007/10/enumerate-effective-base-permissions.html

Once I had done this I had access to the Site Collection Policies page.... Once there I added my expiration policy and then went and added it to my list through the Information management policy settings page.

After waiting for the Policy to run (This happens daily) I went back to double check my expire items had been deleted.... And they had. Success!

Hope this helped.