Publishing records

The MICHAEL platform uses a clear separation between the production and the publication of records. Two separate modules handle these general tasks. Of course, at some point, it is needed to publish a record newly created of modified in the production module, and this document explains how to do this.

The act of publishing makes the record visible in the public interface. You should do this only when you think that the record is good enough to be seen by the public. Also, only users members of the group validators can publish records.

1) Can a record be published?

Not all records can be published, there are some constraints; the aim of this section is to list these constraints.

1.1) Valid records

Only valid records can be published. It means that the record status, in its metadata, must be set to Valid . The MICHAEL platform provides easy shortcuts to validate a record , and the record status can also be set in the record's data entry form.

Only the users members of the group validators can validate a record in order to publish it.

2) Publishing a single record

If you want to publish a single record, you must browse to the folder containing the record and then use the Publish entry in the drop-down list on the right of the document, such as in this figure:

You need to click on the arrow in order to start the process. Results of the publishing action will be discussed later in this document.

In some cases, you will want to validate a draft record and then publish it. The system provides a shortcut to do this, as explained before:

Once the record is validated, it is automatically published. This action gives exactly the same result as if you were to validate and then publish the document in two steps.

3) Publishing a folder

It is also possible to publish the whole content of a folder. To do this, browse to the parent folder of the folder you want to publish, and select the appropriate action in the drop-down list on the right of the folder name:

There are two actions available: one to publish the content of the folder and the content of all its sub-folders, recursively, and the other one to only publish the records in the folder (non recursively). These actions will be available only if the folder contains some valid records; otherwise you won't see the drop-down list and its entries.

4) Results of the publishing process

The results of publishing one or many documents are currently displayed in a rather technical format, such as this window:

This is a raw XML file with details on deleted documents and added documents. At some time, the result will be formatted for human consumption.

The information provided is the list of documents that have been deleted (because they are replace) and a summary of documents added (number of documents, number of errors, and duration in seconds). Once you get this window, you an close it to continue your work.

5) Unpublishing a document

Sometimes it may be needed to remove a document from the publishing module. To do so, you must browse to the folder containing the document, and then click on the Unpublish entry in the drop-down list on the right of the record title:

Once selected, you should click on the arrow next to the drop-down list to initiate the action. The results will be displayed in a similar window than the results of the publishing action, such as this one: