Work with Drafts
A draft holds the changes recorded in a task. The Drafts section of the task detail lists every change in the task, and you can remove changes from it before the task is published.
Before you start, see Tasks and Publishing for how tasks and drafts fit together, and Access Tasks for more details about tasks.
Start editing
Once you start making changes to a record, a task with a draft is created for you and the toolbar appears. The toolbar stays with you while you edit, so you can submit or publish the task without opening the task detail.
The toolbar shows the task identifier and name and whether all your changes have been saved.
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The task ID opens the task detail.
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The summary of changes shows how many edited records the task contains. Select it to view the modified values at a glance.
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Stop editing saves your changes and closes the task toolbar.
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For the workflow options, such as Resolve and publish, Move to publish, or Resolve and discard, see Resolve Tasks.
For editing itself, see Edit Values.
Continue editing later
If you stopped editing, or you were assigned a task that someone else started, open the task and select Edit next to the record you want to modify. The record opens together with the toolbar.
If the task has no draft yet, for example, because it was created automatically, the Edit action is grayed out on this screen until you select Create draft and then Resume editing. The toolbar appears, and you can open the records and edit them.
Alternatively, you can first open the record by selecting the record identifier in the task toolbar and select Edit.
Add changes to a task
To add another change to a task, keep the task open in the toolbar and go to the record you want to change. When you edit it, or select Merge to merge it with another record, you’re asked whether to use the active task or save the change to another one. If you use the active task, the change is added to its draft. A task can combine changes of different kinds, for example, an edit and a merge.
While a task is open, you can’t create a new record. Stop editing first.
Read the Drafts section
The Drafts section of the task detail lists the changes recorded in the task.
If the task has no draft yet, the section is empty and offers Create draft. Otherwise, you see:
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The draft identifier and state. The state follows the task: Active while you work on it, then Published or Discarded once the task is resolved.
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The changes in the draft, grouped by type, with the number of changes in each and the entity they belong to.
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When the draft was last edited and by whom.
To see what a change does, select Preview next to it. For a merge, the preview shows what the surviving record would look like: which attributes change and which record each value comes from. You can still choose a different survivor or edit the values here before the task is published.
Remove an edit from a draft
| This action can’t be undone. |
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In the Drafts section, find the edit you want to leave out.
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Select Delete next to it.
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Confirm your choice.
Changes are deleted one at a time. A draft whose changes have all been deleted stays listed as empty. To drop all changes in a task at once, discard the task. See Discard task.
If a change refers to a record that no longer exists, for example, because its master record was deleted, the Drafts section shows the message "Some changes in this draft refer to records that no longer exist, so they are hidden and the draft can’t be published." Such a task can’t be published. Discard it and make the remaining changes in a new task.
Publish the changes
A draft isn’t published on its own. To apply its changes to master data, publish the task. See Publish task.
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