Document Lifecycle

Version 164.1 by Marius Dumitru Florea on 2015/09/01

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. If you don't want the new page to be a child of the current page then you can change the location of the target page using the document picker (by selecting an existing parent). 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.

DeleteConfirmFlamingo.png

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

It is possible to create a copy of an existing page. To do so, you need to do a search with Admin Rights using the title of the page you want to copy. You will then see a "Copy" button if you click on the "Page" menu.

After clicking "Copy" you will be prompted to enter the location of the page you want to copy in the "Target Space" and the "Target Page" fields. Click on "Copy" and you're done!

On the Flamingo skin
CopyPageFlamingo.png

CopyPageConfirmFlamingo.png

Move/Rename

A rename feature is available in XWiki. Its effect is to change the page name (that is, you get http://<server>/xwiki/bin/View/NewSpace/NewPageName instead of http://<server>/xwiki/bin/View/OldSpace/OldPageName) and all the backlinks linking to it. This means that you can easily move a page from one space to another, as well as keep them evolving with your wiki.

The rename will perform 2 refactorings:

  • update backlinks
  • update parent information

Limitations: currently backlinks located in Objects and translated content won't be refactored.

When using the Flamingo skin, you can access the rename feature for a page by clicking on "Rename" under the "Page" menu in the top menu bar:

RenameFlamingo.png

RenameConfirmFlamingo.png

After clicking "Rename" you will be prompted to input the "New Space" and "New Page" names you want your document to have.

Now you can link to the page using its new name.

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 in objects attached to pages are not currently renamed. You can track 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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