When an event occurs in the registry, CentraSite determines which policies are “within scope” and executes those policies in priority order (from lowest assigned value to the highest assigned value). If an action within a policy fails, CentraSite immediately exits the policy. It does not execute any of the remaining actions in the policy, nor does it execute any remaining policies that are within scope of the event.

If the policy was triggered by a pre-operation event (for example, a PreCreate event or a PreStateChange event) the requested operation is also not executed. For example, if a user attempts to add an XML Schema to the catalog, and the schema does not satisfy a validation policy that is triggered by the PreCreate event for XML Schemas, CentraSite will reject the user's request to add the new schema to the catalog.

Policy failures are written to CentraSite's policy log. From the Inbox page in CentraSite Control, users can view the failed policies that were logged during the events that they initiated. Administrators with View Policy Log permission can view and query the entire log using CentraSite Control's Logging feature.