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Document state

Last update: March 26, 2025

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To manage the readiness of the documents, Adobe Experience Manager Guides provides document state property to indicate the current state of the document. Document states help you quickly find out whether a document is new, in review, or review completed state.

Types of document states

A document can have any of the document states defined in the Document State profile. For example, a document may have any one of the following Document States:

Draft - Indicates that the document is created and saved with new changes.
In-Review - Indicates that a review workflow has been initiated for the document.
Reviewed - Indicates that the document has been reviewed by the intended users.

These states are set manually or automatically according to the Document States profile settings. For example, if the Document state profile is configured with start state as Draft, and In-Review state is defined for documents under review. Then, when you create a document, the document state is set to Draft. If you initiate a review task, then the state of the document is changed to In-Review.

You can also manually change the document state for a single or multiple documents. However, if you choose to change the document state for multiple documents, then the allowed state is determined by the common states that are allowed for the selected documents. For example, let’s say you have defined the document states as Draft, In-Review, Reviewed, and Ready to Publish, in the same order. On document one.dita the state is set to Draft and on document two.dita, the state is set to Reviewed. When you select both one.dita and two.dita, then the allowed document state will be Ready to Publish. As two.dita is in Reviewed state, the next possible state for two.dita is only Ready to Publish, which is shown when both documents are selected.

NOTE

A document can exist in only one state at a time.

Change document state from the Editor

To change the state of a document, perform the following steps:

Open the document in the Editor and then select File properties from the Right panel.
In the File properties panel, select the new state from the Document state dropdown. You can select only those document states that are allowed in the State Transition section of the Document State profile.

NOTE
Administrators can view all document states and change the document to any possible state.
Select Save in the confirmation prompt.

Change document state from the Assets UI

In the Assets UI, select one or more documents for which you want to change the document state.
In the main toolbar, select Properties.
Select the new state from the Document State dropdown. You can select only those document states that are allowed in the State Transition section of the Document State profile.

NOTE
Administrators can view all document states and change the document to any possible state.
Select Save & Close.

View document state

The card view of the Assets UI shows the current state along with the creation date and size of the respective DITA topic or DITA map.

Use document states in DDLC

Document states play an important role in managing the lifecycle of documents in DDLC. If your organization strictly follows the DDLC, then having a mechanism to control editing documents based on their state becomes an essential feature. For example, you can allow editing documents when they are in Draft or In-review states. However, once a document is reviewed and is ready to publish, then there should be a way to prevent further modification of documents.

Experience Manager Guides provides document approval workflow, which helps you to control the lifecycle of your document development process. Once a document is ready to publish or has reached the penultimate state, you can mark it as approved. Once a document is approved, Experience Manager Guides creates a new version of the document and makes it read-only. You can then move the document for publishing or create a baseline for further processing.

To start a new release form the documents that are marked as approved, an author has to start a new release. Starting a new release changes the document state to Draft again. By changing the document state to Draft, the document is again made editable and you can continue working on the next release.

To use the document approval feature, perform the following steps:

NOTE

The approval workflow feature must be enabled by your administrator. For more details, view Enable approval workflow section in the Install and configure Adobe Experience Manager Guides as a Cloud Service.

In the Editor, open the document that you want to mark for approval.
Select the Mark Approved icon.
If your document is in the state to be marked as approved, the following dialog appears:

If your document cannot be marked as approved, then the following message is displayed:
If your document is ready to be marked as approved, then select a label from the drop-down list and select Approve.

NOTE
If your administrator has not configured a predefined list of labels, then you are shown a free-form text field to enter a label.
Once the document is successfully marked as approved, then a Preview of the document is shown in the read-only mode. All the editing options are removed from all the three modes - Author, Source, and Preview. However, you still get access to the Menu dropdown that features the Version history and Tags options.

NOTE
In the Preview mode, the Menu dropdown featuring the Version history and Tags options, is removed from the toolbar.

Once a document is marked as approved, it is no longer available for editing. If you want to use the document for the next release, then you need to bring it back to the Draft state. To change the document state of an approved document back to Draft mode, perform the following steps:

In an approved document, select the Start a New Release Icon .

The Start New Release message appears.
Select Confirm.

The document’s state is changed to Draft and the document is opened in the Editor in the edit mode.

Parent topic:Introduction to the Editor

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