Document Lifecycle

Version 180.1 by Eduard Moraru on 2016/03/02

XWiki offers to perform several actions on a document (a.k.a a page).

Create

There are three ways to create new pages.

You can edit an existing page and create a link to your new page (either in Wiki mode or in WYSIWYG mode). The resulting link will show up with a question mark next to it, showing it as a non-existent page. Simply click on the link to create the page as a child of the current page.

CreateInWYSIWYG.PNG

This will take you directly to the edit mode for the missing page. This is the recommended approach as it'll allow you to create a hierarchy while you create new pages.

Starting with XWiki Enterprise 2.4 users and applications can provide documents that can be used as templates when creating new pages. The new document content (content, objects and other meta data) will be replicated from the template. When clicking on a "wanted link", if there are available templates, you will be asked to select one:

templateSelectorForWantedLink.png

Then you will be taken to the Inline Form edit mode corresponding to the selected page template.

By using the Add Page action

You can create a new child page for the current page by using the plus icon located to the right of the page title.

AddPage.png

This will open the Create Page wizard where you can specify the title of the new page.

By default, the new page will be created as a child of the current page. If you don't want that, then you can change the location of the target page using the document picker (by selecting an existing parent).

Note: When creating a new page from the wiki's homepage (i.e. clicking the plus icon from the wiki's homepage), there is an exception to the above behavior. In this case, the default is to create a top level document instead of a child of the current page (homepage). If your intention was really to create a child of the homepage (which is not usually the case for homepages), then you can use the document picker and select the homepage as parent of the new page.

You can also select a template for the new page.

Once you're done click the "Create" button and you will be able to edit your newly created page right away.

CreatePage.png

Prior to XWiki 7.2M3 the Add Page action was located in the top level menu.

By entering directly the URL of the new page

You can also enter the new page name (and its path) directly in the URL of your browser. For example http://localhost:8080/xwiki/bin/view/Movies/Thriller/Rear Window. If the target page doesn't exist then you'll get an empty page with a message saying that the page doesn't exist and there'll be a link to create it:

CreateInURL.PNG

Edit

This allows the editing of a page. See the page editing tutorial for more details.

Show

Whenever you click on a link to a page XWiki automatically shows the page in view mode. This is the default mode. XWiki also supports displaying the page in other formats that may be more adapted to specific circumstances:

Code

You can view the content of a page without having to edit it (and thus you don't need edit rights). This option is shown only for users in Advanced Mode

To see the code when using the Flamingo skin, you have to go to the More Actions menu, and click on View Source.

ViewSourceFlamingo.png

WikiCodeResultFlamingo.png

XML

XWiki allows exposing a page in XML. This is not ordinarily useful, but it can prove useful for example if you want to write a tool that automatically parses the content of a page. As the XML format is well-defined for all pages, this is much easier than doing screen-scrapping for example. In addition this XML format is used internally by XWiki for performing imports/exports of pages and whole wikis.

Comments

Users with the comment right can leave comments on pages. This allows them to provide feedback without requiring edit rights.

AddComment.png

On the Flamingo skin
CommentsFlamingo.png

Attachments

A page can contain attachments. See Attachments for more details.

History

Displays the version history of the page. See Version Control for more details.

Print

There are several possible printing options (what you see may vary depending on the Skin used).

When using the Flamingo Skin, you will find the Print Preview by clicking on More Actions:

  • Print Preview: Generates a page which is formatted so that it can be easily printed using your browser's Print feature.

    ViewSourceFlamingo.png

Export

There are several possible exporting formats that XWiki supports: PDF, RTF, XAR, HTML. See the Export feature for more information.

On the Flamingo skin:
ExportFlamingo.png

ExportFlamingoPDF.png

Delete

Removes a page and puts it in the trash. 

DeletePageFlamingo.png

A confirmation is asked before the removal is done. Here, you can decide either or not to delete the children along with the current document.

DeleteConfirmFlamingo.png

Note: When deleting a non-terminal page and the only child of that page is the 'WebPreferences' terminal page, the 'Affect children' checkbox will be checked by default. Normally, it would be unchecked, but in this case we`ve noticed that it`s very easy to forget about that document (since it's hidden and automatically created when going into 'Page Administration') and your deleted page might still show up in some places because of that leftover. You can still uncheck it if you know what you are doing.

Then, you have to wait during the deletion of the page:

Deleting.png

And finally, you have the success message:

DeleteFlamingoConfirm.png

Restore

To restore a deleted document or remove it from the trash (you'll need to have Admin permissions), check the documentation for the Index Application.

Copy

If you want to create a copy of an existing page then you have to navigate to that page (access that page in view mode) and then select the Copy entry from the page menu (that is located to the right of the page title).

CopyPageFlamingo.png

This will take you to the Copy Page Wizard where you can specify the title of the copy and its new location.

CopyPageConfirmFlamingo.png

If the page is translated in multiple languages then you can select which translation to copy, or you can copy all the translations. If the page has child pages then you can choose to copy them as well (this way you can replicate a hierarchy of pages).

copyStatus.png

Once you click the Copy button you are taken to the Copy Status page where you can see the options that you have selected and the progress of the copy operation. The copy is performed asynchronously. The progress bar is replaced with the operation status at the end in order to let you know if the operation succeeded or failed. You can use the breadcrumbs to navigate to the new page or the old one.

Move/Rename

If you want to rename or move an existing page then you have to navigate to that page (access that page in view mode) and then select the Rename entry from the page menu (that is located to the right of the page title).

RenameFlamingo.png

This will take you to the Rename Page Wizard where you can specify the new page title (if you want to rename) and/or the new page location (if you want to move the page to a different location).

RenameConfirmFlamingo.png

If the page has child pages then you can choose to move them to the new location as well. This way the hierarchy under the renamed page is going to be preserved. Otherwise, if you choose to preserve the current path of the child pages (keep the children in place) then they will become "orphans": they will still be accessible with the same URLs (bookmarks are not broken) but they will have a missing parent (which you can fix by creating the parent page later).

You can also select whether to update the wiki pages that have links pointing to the affected pages.

In case there are external links (e.g. bookmarks) to the renamed page (or its child pages) they will be broken after the rename unless you choose to create an automatic redirect from the old location to the new one.

renameProgress.png

Once you click the Rename button you are taken to the Rename Status page where you can see the options that you have selected and the progress of the rename operation. The rename, like the copy, is performed asynchronously. The progress bar is replaced with the operation status at the end in order to let you know if the operation succeeded or failed. You can use the breadcrumbs to navigate to the new page or the old one.

Limitations

There are still some limitations on renaming:

  • backlinks have to be turned on (they are turned on by default but if you have turned them off, rename will not rename backlinks and you'll have to turn them on again to benefit from this feature)
  • backlinks located in XObjects and translated content are not currently renamed. You can track this issue XWIKI-981 to follow the progress.
  • backlinks are saved when a page is saved thus it may happen with a clean XWiki database that backlinks are not saved. In this special case, you can call the following in a page to refresh all links (you'll need to be admin to do this):
    $xwiki.refreshLinks()
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