Editor can't edit document under request (de facto workaround?)

Hi community,

We recently changed back to the default document workflow and noticed that (1) editors can’t edit documents that have a request attached to them. I found two related issues that both got closed without fix:

https://issues.onehippo.com/browse/CMS-4482
https://issues.onehippo.com/browse/CMS-4656

As a workaround, an editor can reject the request, edit, and subsequently publish the document, but (2) the rejected request remains and the author is notified even though no action is required from them.

(3) Another issue we see is that editors can’t themselves request for publish. Although editors obviously have the authority to publish directly, they sometimes write documents themselves that they would like to have peer reviewed.

I was wondering for each of these 3 issues, what the motive behind these choices are and what workarounds others with similar requirements have thought of.

  1. You don’t want to allow edits on a document under review. If you approve, what version are you approving? Any solution to this problem introduces complexity for little gain. More specifically, if the editor doing the review does the edit there seems to be less reason to block editing. This may be valid, but only if you can assure there isn’t another editor looking at the same document. Else it isn’t really a special case after all.

  2. Well, as you say, it is a workaround. Is it better to directly edit or to send it back to the author? That is dependent on the organisation.

  3. It is certainly the case that some organizations require a (different) person review any publication. Even some that require multiple people to do reviews. For this custom workflows are used [1].

You can probably implement any workflow you can conceive of, if you’re willing to do the work. You really need to think about the use for that. In practice complicated workflows lead to workarounds.

[1]https://documentation.bloomreach.com/library/concepts/workflow/workflow.html