Programmatically declaring and undeclaring records can be useful in case you need to modify dates or metadata to trigger retention.

An example of this would be: Multiple court case documents sitting declared as records in a record library, with document disposition rules that trigger disposition 3 years after the case resolution date.

There is no way you could have put in the case resolution date prior to the completion of litigation and the documents need to be in the record center to prevent tampering with.

You could build an interface in a web part or _layouts page that allows a user to input the case resolution date and the code behind will

1. undeclare all the records about this case
2. add the resolution date
3. redeclare the record.

At this point disposition rules would kick in and dispose of the document after the required time period.

The code used to declare and undeclare the records is as follows:

You need to add the following namespace:

using Microsoft.Office.RecordsManagement.RecordsRepository;

Then you need the following bits of code to run against all the documents that match the selected court case:

SPSecurity.RunWithElevatedPrivileges(delegate()
{
	using (site = new SPSite(siteurl))
	{
		using (spWeb = site.OpenWeb(webguid))
		{
			list = spWeb.Lists[listguid];
			if (list != null)
			{
				item = list.Items[itemguid];
				//Checking whether the item is a record or not
				if (item != null && Records.IsRecord(item))
				{
					Records.UndeclareItemAsRecord(item);     //undeclares the item as a record
					//UPDATE ITEM HERE
					Records.DeclareItemAsRecord(item);     //declares the item as a record
				}
			}
		}
	}
});

Update:

I just found an MSDN article that identifies anotehr option to updating records programatically. It makes use of the Records.BypassLocks method which is called using the following block of code:

using Microsoft.Office.RecordsManagement.RecordsRepository;

SPSecurity.RunWithElevatedPrivileges(delegate()
{
    Records.BypassLocks(myListItem, delegate(SPListItem item)
    {
        //Perform any action on the item.
    });
});

Hope this code will be helpful to you. Let me know in the comments or via Twitter.

There is more to come soon. Stay tuned!