Publish your workflow changes (draft and live)

This article explains how draft and live workflow versions work in Intellistack Streamline, who can publish, and what to expect for people already in a workflow session.

What draft and live mean

When you edit a workflow in the workflow builder, your changes are saved to a draft. The live version is what new respondents and new sessions use until you Publish.

• Draft - Work in progress. You can keep editing; auto-save continues to apply to the draft.
• Live - The published configuration. This is what end users experience when they start new sessions after you publish.
• Publish - You explicitly promote the current draft so it becomes the new live version for the workflow.

Until you publish, people starting new activity on the live workflow continue to see the last published version, not your unfinished draft.

Note: Only the (new) Forms step is compatible with the publish feature. If your workflow uses the previous Forms step, you’ll see the error “The workflow does not have a draft version to publish” when you attempt to publish. Workflows using the previous Forms step will continue to function normally without publishing, just as they did before.

How to publish your changes

Exact labels and placement in the builder can vary by release. In general:

1. Open the workflow builder for the project’s workflow.
2. Confirm the product shows whether you have unpublished changes (draft differs from live). Use that indicator so you know share surfaces are not showing your draft yet.
3. When you are ready for shared link, QR code, embed, and other share options to use your updates, use the Publish action in the builder.
4. After publishing, run through any checks your team uses (for example, a quick test via the shared link or Run session) if the workflow is critical.

Testing before you publish

You can run a session against the draft to validate the experience before you publish to live users. Entry points and labels for that flow depend on the product version; use the options available in your builder or session tools for draft execution.

What happens to people already in a workflow

Sessions that already started keep running on the workflow version that was live when the session started. Publishing does not force in-flight sessions onto the new configuration mid-session.

New sessions started after you publish use the latest published version. 

So it is normal for an older session to behave differently from a session someone starts right after a publish - that is expected when the live version changed between those two starts.

You can see in your Sessions page the Version that session was run on.