Updating Publishing Page attribute in SharePoint Online

We have moved over to using the Patterns and Practices approach to SharePoint site deployment, with the exception of a few older or more complex .wsp based sites and for one product we are using post-provisioning tasks to modify the values of a custom content type based on values passed through PnP by storing them in the property bag.

Initially, the site template we were using was a vanilla Team Site, however, it was deemed necessary to enable publishing to achieve certain goals. Once this was done, we needed to checkin/checkout/publish the page in order to make and save the changes. This was failing with the save operation complaining that the page was checked out. Initially I was shouting at SP because I knew the page was checked out, because I had asked for it to be, however, it seems that this wasn't the checkout SP was referring to.

Finding this post on Stack Overflow (http://sharepoint.stackexchange.com/questions/59177/check-out-update-then-check-in-a-file-in-sharepoint-client-object-model) it seems that the flow needs to be:

• Check out
• ExecuteQuery()
• Modify
• Update()
• ExecuteQuery()
• Checkin
• Publish
• ExecuteQuery()

When we did this the page was successfully updated. One thing that I additionally did was to wrap the checkout/executequery in a try/catch so that if the page was already checked out, it would carry on and run the update. However, this will probably only be a solution if the user who has the page checked out is the same as that running the current update.