R – SharePoint Approval Workflow

If I understand your question you have a workflow that starts on add or change. But there are some circumstances where the item changes where you do not want the workflow to start. You cannot start the workflow in code because you need end users to add your workflow to lists themselves.

The only option then is to have the first activity in the workflow do checks to see if the workflow instance should be running. If not, exit the workflow instance. If you're building the workflow in SharePoint Designer and don't have such an activity you can build a custom activity for this in Visual Studio 2008 and then use that with SharePoint Designer. If you are building the whole workflow in Visual Studio 2008 then you can create a custom activity in Visual Studio to use with it.

The problem is , is that publishing requires you to specify who is the approver in the _layouts/IniWrkflIP.aspx form. There is no way fpr that page to work for more than 1 item (it works on 1 specific item to be approved / published). Hence there is no button to bulk publish / approve.

What is possible though is to create a customaction in the actions panel of a list (i.e. in the pages list of your site) that does the bulk process for that specific list. Because in code you can traverse all items in the list, check if it is a ScheduledItem and then Schedule the publishing:

 if (PublishingPage.IsPublishingPage(item))
 {
   PublishingPage.GetPublishingPage(item).CheckIn("Checked in during import");
 }
 else
   if (ScheduledItem.IsScheduledItem(item))
   {
     try
     {
       ScheduledItem thisScheduled = ScheduledItem.GetScheduledItem(item);
       thisScheduled.Schedule("Page was automatically approved by the system");
     }
     catch (Exception)
     {
       //LOG ERROR
     }
   }