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Last updated: 19 Oct 2023

whitehall: Edition Workflow

(See also Edition model for more on the model objects involved)

Editions will be in one of a number of states. The state machine for them is located in workflow.rb. This configures the possible transitions between states, resulting in this:

Transitions graph

Note that a Document has no state, there is just state inferred by the various Editions. This diagram doesn't show the effect of multiple editions - sometimes a state transition involves superseding an existing edition and replacing it with a new one, with its own state.

Unpublishing / Withdrawal

Some status is also controlled by the presence or otherwise of a related Unpublishing record. These are created during the withdraw and unpublish transitions. Editors trigger these in the EditionWorkflowController. The three options for Unpublishing or Withdrawing correspond to an UnpublishingReason, each of which control the behaviour of a document when visited by a user:

ID Name State Requires explanation? Requires URL? Redirects? Shows original content?
1 PublishedInError unpublished No No If provided No
4 Consolidated unpublished No Yes Yes No
5 Withdrawn withdrawn Yes No No Yes

If a document has an edition in one of the Edition::PUBLICLY_VISIBLE_STATES (published or withdrawn), Whitehall's DocumentsController will render it. If an Unpublishing exists, the withdrawal notice will be rendered near the top of the page as well.

If a document does not have an edition in one of these states, it will use the Unpublishing to determine the response. If the Unpublishing is a redirect, ie a Consolidated Unpublishing, it will redirect to the alternative url. Otherwise it will render the unpublished view.

The PublishingApiUnpublishingWorker uses the above to decide what to do with an Unpublishing when sending the content to the Publishing API. It will always call the unpublish endpoint, with one of the following types:

Unpublishing type Publishing API unpublishing type
PublishedInError with alternative url redirect
PublishedInError without alternative url gone
PublishedInError gone
Consolidated redirect
Withdrawn withdrawn

LinkCheckerAPI

The link-checker-api has been integrated on the show page for Editions. It extracts all links from within any GovSpeak fields and sends them to the /batch endpoint of the API. In this request it also sends across a webhook_callback which then populates any information about broken/warning links. More reading about the endpoints can be found here