Publish and lifecycle

The four states

• Draft: building or editing. No triggers fire, no runs start. Autosave is permissive: empty fields are fine.
• Active: published and live. Triggers fire, new runs enroll, in-flight runs continue.
• Paused: triggers stop firing. Existing runs keep going on their current path; waiting runs hold their wake-at.
• Archived: read-only. All in-flight runs are cancelled. You can duplicate an archived workflow but not edit it.

Lifecycle transitions

• Draft → Active: click Publish. Strict validation runs; the workflow goes live on the first passing publish.
• Active ⇄ Paused: toggle from the top bar. No data loss either way.
• Active / Paused → Archived: click Archive. Confirm in the modal. All in-flight runs cancel immediately.
• Any state → Deleted: soft-delete. See Delete and archive below.

Validation rules

Publish runs the strict validator. The most common rules in plain English:

• Exactly one trigger: a workflow can have only one trigger node.
• No incoming edges into a trigger: triggers are the starting point.
• No cycles: a node cannot lead back to itself, directly or indirectly.
• Every non-Exit node has at least one outgoing edge: end every path with another action or an Exit. See Wait and exit.
• Conditions wire both YES and NO: each condition must have both branches, or send one to Exit.
• Filled inspector fields: campaign picked, tag string non-empty, list selected, webhook URL valid, etc.

When validation fails, each issue is attached to a node so you can Jump to node from the Publish modal and fix it in place. Drafts save permissively so you can iterate without errors.

Stale-version conflicts

If a teammate (or another tab) saves the workflow while you have unsaved changes, the next autosave returns a STALE_VERSION error. The status bar shows: "Another change was saved elsewhere. Reload to see the latest."Reload the page to pull in the latest version. Your unsaved local edits are not lost in the browser, but the safer path is always to reload first and re-apply.

Duplicate

Click the Duplicate icon in the top bar to make an exact copy as a new Draft. Useful for A/B testing (clone an Active workflow, tweak one node, publish both, segment by tag). The duplicate starts at draft with no run history.

Delete and archive

Archive is the recommended way to wind down a workflow that's no longer needed. It cancels in-flight runs and stops new enrollments, but keeps the graph and full run history forever for analytics.

Delete is a soft-delete and only available from the Archived state. Run history is preserved for 30 days for auditing, then purged. You cannot undelete after the 30 day window.

FAQ

What happens to in-flight runs when I pause a workflow?

Running runs finish their current node then sit at the next node. Waiting runs keep their wake-at and resume when you unpause.

Can I edit an active workflow?

Yes. Drafts are auto-saved. In-flight runs continue on the version they started on. New runs use the latest published version.

Does Delete remove run history?

Run history is preserved for 30 days, then purged.

Next steps