SharePoint Event Receivers & Expiration Policy

More event receiver fun this week.

I've been writing some synchronous event receivers this week, one of which has been causing a headache, name ItemDeleting.

The event receiver acts correctly when users manually delete an item...great
The event receiver also acts correctly when a workflow deletes an item...great

If an item has an information management policy attached to it 'permanently delete' or 'move to recycle bin', the Expiration Policy timer job will kick in and delete the item.

BUT the event receiver will not be fired when the timer job executes!!!!!!

Cause : when the Expiration Policy timer job deletes an item it actually does an SPItem.SystemUpdate(); rather than SPItem.Update();


Worth bearing in mind if you need to capture an event driven from the Expiration policy timer job.