Versions and publishing
The checks a flow must pass to go live, and how to take it back out again.
The Versions tab is the publishing surface. A published flow is the one that answers real messages, so everything it depends on has to be settled first.
What the summary shows
Before publishing, the view restates the flow in plain language so the configuration can be checked as a whole rather than a step at a time:
- the claim — which messages this flow answers,
- how many data elements it writes to DHIS2,
- how many groups of people it alerts, and
- how many of its signal codes carry a description.
The code count is a readiness signal rather than a hard requirement. A flow can publish with undescribed codes; it usually should not.
What blocks publishing
Three things will stop a flow going live.
Unfinished steps. Any wizard step still missing something is listed by name. Finish those first.
Unsaved changes. A flow that has not been saved to the backend cannot be published — save, then publish. This avoids publishing a configuration that differs from the one on screen.
A claim collision. If another published flow already answers anything unclaimed, and this one would too, whichever is checked second would never receive a message. The portal names the conflicting flow rather than letting the collision through.
Publishing takes effect immediately
A published flow starts answering real messages as soon as it is published. There is no staged rollout, so use the Test and publish step to run a signal end to end first.
Publishing
Choose Publish and confirm. The flow's status changes to Published and it enters the checking order for incoming messages.
Returning to draft
Return to draft takes a flow back out of the pipeline. Messages it used to claim immediately fall through to whichever flow claims them next — usually the fallback.
That fall-through is the part worth thinking about before unpublishing. If no other flow claims those messages and there is no fallback, they will not be handled at all, and the reporters sending them will get no reply.
After going live
Watch the first real messages arrive in the logs explorer. A newly published flow that is claiming messages but failing at the grammar or mapping stage will show up there within minutes, and is much easier to catch then than in a weekly report.