What is the best way to have a 'draft' version of a Hive page?

What is the best way to have a 'draft' version of a Hive page?

Question

Some of our Hives contain manually created summaries of the visualizations on a Hive page. Periodic changes to the data require that the summaries be updated. Although this is an easy task to complete, the challenge is that the summaries need to go through a review process before they are approved. Is there a technique to have a 'draft' page where changes can be made, the reviewers can collaborate on the content, and then, when finalized, the page could then be published and the old page would be removed.

Answer

There are a couple of ways to accomplish this, the first way is to create a new page in the Production Hive, publish it when it's ready, and then delete the original page. Although this approach would work, continuous edits would have to be done on a Production Hive, which is usually frowned upon in most organizations. There could also be quite a bit of manipulation to the access permissions every time that a new 'draft' page is created. If you're following deployment best practices, you'll be monitoring usage of the Hives, and this technique would cause extra traffic to the Hive that would skew the traffic numbers, or you'd have to filter out the authors access. Either way, additional work to arrive at the desired results.

A more efficient approach to solving this challenge is through the use of a Hive copy that would only be utilized for updating the summaries, and any other content that needs regular updating, as well as collaborating with the content reviewers. The first step would be to create a duplicate of the Hive in the Digital Hive Control Center.

  1. As a Digital Hive administrator, open the Control Center by launching the "Manage Digital Hive" option from the user avatar
  2. Go to the Hives section
  3. Locate the desired Hive, and using the vertical ellipsis  select the  action (based on the amount of content, this operation could take a minute or two)
  4. Open the properties for the newly created Hive by clicking anywhere on the new line item (except the URL)
  5. Provide a new name for the copy of the Hive, by clicking on the  icon
  6. Press  to apply the changes to the name
  7. If desired, perform the previous actions to create a custom URL for the Hive
  8. Click the  icon beside the Shared With... option to set the access permissions for the Hive. The Hive will remain in a draft status, so it's ok to leave the users/roles that have view access only, as they won't be able to see the Hive. Ensure that the content editors, collaborators, and reviewers all have Edit level access to the Hive
  9. Press Close
  10. Click anywhere outside of the Properties page to close it


With a copy of the original Production Hive made, let's take a look at what is required inside of the Hive Designer. The next part of the process is optional, but is recommended to delete the extra pages that will not be modified on a regular basis.

If you delete a page that you shouldn't have, or if requirements change after the page was deleted from the copy, don't worry, you can always re-import the page from the original Hive, using the steps outlined later in this document.


  1. Open the copied Hive
  2. As a user with 'Edit' capabilities, click on the Hive launcher icon  and then select the Open Designer menu option. If this menu option is not visible, then the logged in user does not have edit access to the copied Hive
  3. Access the Page listing by clicking on the down arrow beside the page name, Sales Dashboard in the example below, within the Designer toolbar
     

  4. Using the ... icon select Delete page for a page that needs to be deleted from the copied Hive. These will be a page that won't require updating on a regular basis.
  5. Confirm the delete action by clicking on Delete
  6. Repeat steps 4 and 5 for all other pages that require deleting
The result is a 'draft' Hive that is ready to be modified and updated when required. In this example, there are only two pages that will require monthly updates.


Once modifications have been made to reflect new data, or new updates to the Hive, here is the process to 'replace' the updated page(s) within the Production version of the Hive.

  1. Launch the Production Hive
  2. As a user with 'Edit' capabilities, click on the Hive launcher icon  and then select the Open Designer menu option. If this menu option is not visible, then the logged in user does not have edit access to the Production Hive
  3. Access the Page listing by clicking on the down arrow beside the page name, within the Designer toolbar
  4. Select the Import pages... option
  5. Locate the copied Hive and click on the down arrow to expose the page name(s)


  6. Select the page(s) to be imported into the Production Hive
  7. Press Import which can be found at the bottom pages menu
  8. Because the original page is still present, the imported page containing the updates will append a 1 to the name and a _1 to the URL, as seen below


  9. The imported page(s) will appear at the bottom of the page list. To get the page to the right position, access the Page listing by clicking on the down arrow beside the page name, within the Designer toolbar
  10. Select the imported page, Executive Review 1, in this example, then click and drag the page to the desired location using the  icon. You'll know when the cursor is in the right stop as it will change to an up arrow. Ideally, to maintain consistency, you'll want to move the pages before or after the original page


  11. If you're confident that the imported page has been reviewed, and is ready to be deployed, you can delete the original page, Executive Review in this example, by clicking on the ... beside Executive Review and selecting Delete page. Continue to step 14
  12. If you want to keep the original page 'in case' then click on the original page, and in the Properties panel change the Page name and URL properties by appending _old to the current values. For example:

  13. With the old Production page currently displayed in the Designer, the page that you want to replace (if you didn't delete it in step 11) click on the published  icon beside the page name in the Designer toolbar to unpublish the page. The result after steps 12 & 13 will look like this:


  14. Access the Page listing by clicking on the down arrow beside the page name, within the Designer toolbar
  15. Select the imported, soon to be the new Production, page
  16. In the Properties panel change the Page name and URL properties by removing the _1 from the current values. Ensure that the Page name and URL values are the same as what the original Production page were
  17. Click on the Shared with... link to verify that the correct people have access to the new Hive page. By default, the imported page inherits the access control list from the Hive, so if the Hive is shared with the correct people, the page should be ok, but always verify


  18. Click on the unpublished  icon beside the page name in the Designer toolbar to publish the page


  19. You can now delete the original page (as per step 11) or keep it in an unpublished state which would only be visible to people with edit access to the Hive and to the page
  20. If the save icon in the upper left-hand corner is active  press it to save the changes, otherwise, it was already saved because of the page level change
The result will now be an updated page that has the same name and URL as the original Production page, which will not break any existing links or bookmarks that users may have created. 

If you opted to not delete the original page and left it in an unpublished state, all users that have Edit access to this Hive will see the old page, so the recommendation is to delete the old page.




    • Related Articles

    • Authoring Best Practices Guide

      Overview Digital Hive provides a very robust, zero code, authoring experience that enables authors to create visually stunning and impactful end user applications, called Hives. While the authoring process is very easy and intuitive, there are ...

    • Customizing the Login Page

      Question We would like to brand Digital Hive to seem like it is an extension of our existing applications. Is it possible to customize the appearance of the login page? Answer As a Digital Hive Administrator, It is possible to define the appearance ...

    • Displaying a Specific PowerBI Report Page (Version 2.1 and later)

      Question Within in PowerBI report, there are multiple pages. When a PowerBI report is embedded into Digital Hive, the default page is shown, but I would like for a different page to be displayed. For example, the default page is Content Utilization ...

    • Embedding Videos on a Hive Page

      Question There are corporate videos that we would like to include within a Hive, is it possible to embed the videos so that they are accessible to users? Answer Embedding videos can be done through the use of two different techniques. Which technique ...

    • Add a Hive Page that Opens an External URL

      Question Is it possible to add a top level menu page that launches an external URL? The original plan was to add a page to the Hive menu navigation and then embed the URL onto the page using a Web Page tile, but the target URL does not allow itself ...