Documentation and Possibly UI for Publication Comment Edit Feature

Help / Discuss
1

A workflow has an “Allow custom publication comment” attribute (introduced in XAWORKFLOW-86), which is documented as follows:

Allow custom publication comment:

Add the possibility for editors to define a publication comment that will be used in the history of the target document.

However, I could not find any further instructions whatsoever regarding how to use it - neither what it’s intended for, i.e. the idea behind it, nor how to actually use / modify it in practice.

It looks as if it uses a property of the actual Draft document as the source, and the property has to be set manually in the page’s object editor.

What I was looking for and had expected was some kind of comment setting I could specify when "Publish"ing a page, as a justification for the re-publishing or a high-level summary of the changes in the newly published version, compared to the previously published one.

However this does not seem to be the case and does not seem to be the properties purpose - or is this feature simply unfinished and would need some additional UI? (However storing it at the draft page does not seem to make much sense for the purpose I had in mind.)

Does anyone here have experience with that or can shed some light on it?

2

Hi @GOhrner,

It looks like this comment can be added only from the object mode of a draft, of more specifically of a document that holds a `PublicationWorkflow.PublicationWorkflowClass` object.

This is how it suppose to work:

  1. Edit the workflow configuration page.

  2. Set Allow custom publication comment? to Yes.

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  3. On a draft using that workflow, edit its PublicationWorkflow.PublicationWorkflowClass object.

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  1. Set the Publication comment field.
  2. Publish the document.

Here is the difference of adding that comment or using the default (leaving field empty)

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If you are looking for other UI place to add the comment, there seems to be none.

Hope it helps,
Alex

3

@acotiuga: Ok, thanks! This more or less matches what I think I understood. :slight_smile:

Though I still don’t really understand the intended usecase - as editing this property in the draft document’s objects seems to be rather “static” to me, is not really convenient or obvious to do and I think may easily be forgotten if used for a per-publishing comment.

It would be fine as a static document-specific description, but then again I don’t understand why it’s written to the target document history, where it will be repeated over and over.

So it’s intended usecase does not seem to be the one I was looking for, and I haven’t yet really understood what its intended usecase actually is.

I think I will create a Feature Proposal for better documentation / background information. (Addendum: Loading...)