R – ItemUpdating not showing changed values in SharePoint event receiver

We have the same issue. It appears that the properties from the list are added to the office 2007 doc, but only with the default values for the field on upload/creation. Once the item is edited we are experiencing that the office documents values are overriding the values set in our event handler.

We do not experience this when using an asynchronous event handler, but the asynchronous event handler has conflicts with updates on other threads with certain types of updates.

We have a support call active with Microsoft about this very issue. They acknowledge this is not No results yet.

Try using an asychronous event handler (it runs a little bit later than the code that updates from the office document), but with caution.

UPDATE:

A workaround is setting the SPWeb.ParserEnabled to FALSE will remove the connection to the document properties which will stop the above behaviour. It prevents the list properties from being added to the office document.

Your answer depends a bit on from where and how the SPListItem is retrieved. In a regular list, you do not have access to the previous values of the item. If you turn on versioning, you can get access to the previous versions, depending on permissions, of course.

For a document library you can use the SPItemEventProperties.BeforeProperties to get the previous metadata for a document.

For a document library you can try something like this:

foreach (DictionaryEntry key in properties.BeforeProperties)
{
    string beforeKey = (string)key.Key;
    string beforeValue = key.Value.ToString();

    string afterValue = "";
    if (properties.AfterProperties[beforeKey] != null)
    {
        afterValue = properties.AfterProperties[beforeKey].ToString();
        if (afterValue != beforeValue)
        {
            // Changed...
        }
    }
}

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