Drafts, versions and publishing

How a draft becomes what readers see, what each version keeps, how approval works for people who can't publish, and how to go back to an earlier version.

A report has two states at once. The draft is what you're working on, saved as you go. The published version is what readers see. You can change the draft all week, and nothing reaches readers until you publish.

Who sees what

A report's badge says where it stands: Draft (never published), Published, or Changes not published.

What publishing does

Choose Publish, then Publish now…. The draft as last saved becomes a new numbered version and goes live. What changed is optional and shows in the version history. If others are editing, what's been saved by then goes live, and they carry on in the draft.

Publishing fixes the report's pages, text and settings. Two things stay current:

• Saved charts. A chart placed from the library shows that chart as it is now, in published versions too. Edit the saved chart and the live report follows without a new publish. A chart made inside the report is part of the version.

• Data. A version holds no numbers of its own. Members read current data, and links read a snapshot or live data as you've chosen. Publishing rebuilds the snapshot.

Publish later

Schedule publishing… picks a time, in your organization's time zone. At that time, the draft as last saved goes live, published as you. Scheduled publishes also show under Settings, Schedules.

To check before you publish, Compare with what's live opens both side by side.

Versions

Halo keeps every published version, and any you name:

• Save a named version…, in the Draft menu, keeps the draft as it is now with a name and a note. Readers don't see it. Use it before a big change.

• Versions, in the same menu, lists them all, newest first. Each is marked Published or Named, and the one readers see is marked Live.

Compare any two versions with Compare and With, field by field or side by side, or use Compare with draft on a row.

Approval

Not everyone who edits reports can publish them. A role with report.request_publish but not report.publish asks instead. Analysts work this way by default.

Custom roles can have either permission. See Roles and permissions.

The request

1. The author chooses Request publishing, adds an optional What changed, and sends it. The draft is kept as it was then, and they can keep editing.

2. People who can approve are notified. An approver has report.publish and edit access to the report, and can't approve their own request.

3. The approver opens it from Requests to publish on the Reports page, and sees the submitted draft against what's live.

4. Approve and publish publishes exactly what was submitted, not later edits. Send back returns it with a note.

The author is told either way, and can use Withdraw request while it waits. Asking again replaces the waiting request, and any publish retires it.

Go back to an earlier version

There's no separate roll back. You restore a version into the draft, then publish it:

1. Choose Draft, then Versions.

2. Choose Restore on the version you want. It becomes the draft, and anyone in the editor starts again from it, with anything they hadn't sent yet put back on top.

3. Check it, then publish. Publishing makes a new version with the old content, so the history stays whole.

Readers keep seeing the live version until step 3. Versions also lists who contributed to each one.

To put a report out once a month, quarter or year, with each period kept for good, use editions.

There's no way to unpublish a report, except that withdrawing its only edition leaves nothing published. To stop people outside Halo reading it, turn off its public links and embed links. To remove it for everyone, delete it, and it waits in the Trash.