States

Overview

States act like milestones in your workflow – key stages of your process where something has to happen.

Let's assume we've got a really simple content production process: content is edited, then reviewed, and, if the review is approved, published.

The boxes in the diagram above are the states, and the lines between them are transitions.

When your document is in a specific state, a state content byline item breadcrumb is added to the document subtitle. You can choose this to open the workflow state dialog box to view the transitions from the current state.

Transitions

States can handle several common transitions directly, namely:

submit – a direct transition to one state
updated – an automatic transition which occurs when content is edited
approved and rejected – transitions triggered by completion of a content review
expired – triggered when a state expires
completed – triggered when the last remaining task is completed

Reviews

A state can contain a content review. When the workflow enters the state, the workflow state dialog box displays options for the content review decision.

Reviewers must decide whether to approve or reject the content, and once they are in agreement, the state transitions to the approved or rejected destination state as applicable.

Publishing

States can be designated as a final or published state for the content.

A final state is, by default, displayed with a green state content byline breadcrumb

When using this feature, called same-space publishing, Confluence View-only users only see the most recently published version of the document created on the last transition to the workflow final state, even if the document is being edited in another state in the workflow.

All the included workflows have a final state for your approved documents.

Expiry dates

States can be given expiry dates. There are many uses for this, but one of the most interesting is to trigger periodical reviews of published content:

It's a really simple way to ensure that documentation doesn't go stale. You can use the Content Expiry workflow to automatically add an expiry period on the transition to the final state in this workflow.

Notifications

By default, page watchers are only notified if a state expires.

Additional notifications can be added if required – see Notifications.