Autosave for Articles

Alation Cloud Service Applies to Alation Cloud Service instances of Alation

Customer Managed Applies to customer-managed instances of Alation

Note

Document Hubs are Alation’s new documentation feature set, which will eventually replace articles. Document Hubs are available for public preview starting in 2024.1.

  • See Documentation for more about the advantages of Document Hubs and the future of articles.

  • See Document Hubs for help using Document Hubs.

When you edit the content of an article, your changes are automatically saved as you type. Changes are in “draft mode” until you click the Save button. When you click Save, your changes are saved permanently and email notifications are sent out to the article author, editors, stewards, and watchers.

If you navigate away from the page before clicking Save, your draft is saved for you. Next time you click the Edit button, you’ll get a message that there’s an unsaved draft. You can choose to restore the draft and continue where you left off. You can also ignore the message and make some new changes. If you ignore the message, the old draft is removed and replaced with a draft containing your new changes.

If you click Cancel instead of Save, your draft will be cleared and no changes are saved.

Note

In versions of Alation from 2021.3 to 2023.1.3, Cancel did not clear the draft, and your changes were saved until the Edit button was clicked again.

Drafts for each field in the article are saved separately, so you can cancel or save changes to one field without affecting drafts in another field in the same article.

Your drafts will be saved even if you refresh the page or log out of Alation. However, there are a few cases where changes are not saved automatically:

  • When you @-mention something. You must enter or delete some other text to trigger the autosave.

  • When you’re using the code editor. Your changes will be autosaved as soon as you exit the code editor.

When you add an image to a draft, the image is immediately saved in the Catalog’s image bank. If you discard the draft, the image will no longer be part of your article, but it will remain in the image bank.

Drafts are saved in your browser’s local storage on your computer. If you switch to a different browser, such as from Chrome to Firefox, or to a different computer, your drafts will not be available. You can find your drafts again by returning to the original computer and browser where they were saved. If you share a computer and another user logs into Alation using the same computer and browser as you, they’ll be able to see your drafts.

When you close your browser or delete your browser cache, all unsaved drafts will be lost.