Document status dependencies

Documents in the Authoring cycle

In the topic's portion of the Authoring cycle, topics may not be at a higher state than the topics they reference, whether by xrefs, conrefs, or related links.

Topics are also constrained by the state of their referenced images. A topic cannot advance past Approved until all its referenced images are Done.

Maps in the Authoring cycle have a slightly different set of constraints. They must stay in the Draft state until all the topics they contain have reached Review. At that point a map may be promoted to its own Review state. It must stay in Review until all its constituent topics are Done.

Only when all topics are Done can a map be promoted to Final review. And since topics may not be considered Done until all their images have reached that state, this means that all of a map's constituents—images as well as topics—must be in the Done state before the map may be promoted to Final review.

Documents in the Localization cycle

In the Localization cycle, a map or topic may only move as high as the images or topics that it contains. This means that you cannot promote a map to Review until after you have promoted its topics to that state. In the same way, topics must wait until their referenced images reach Review before they can be promoted to that state in their turn.

Document dependencies

To make sure that these dependencies are respected, the system performs some simple checks when a user is changing a file's status and only offers the choices that make sense.