Draft entities are like notepads or clipboards: they store your work-in-progress information, and they do not interact with other Intelligence Center objects.
Published entities are indexed and searchable Intelligence Center objects that you can analyze, manipulate, and relate to other EclecticIQ Intelligence Center objects.

Draft entities

A draft entity is a work in progress that has not been finalized yet. You can save entities as drafts during the new entity creation step. You can edit, update, download, and delete draft entities at any time without affecting other entities or existing relationships.

The Intelligence Center does not version or index draft entities. This means that you cannot search for draft entities, add draft entities to datasets, add draft entities to workspaces, or display draft entities on the graph.

It is not possible to create multiple drafts of the same entity, this avoids unnecessary data duplication. At any given time, there is only one draft version of an entity in the Intelligence Center, which users can edit and update as often as needed.

The basic draft entity workflow facilitates deleting, editing, and publishing.

Published entities

A published entity is a finalized item. When you publish an entity to the Intelligence Center, the system creates the first major version of the newly published entity. Subsequent save actions generate minor versions. You can review published entity versions in the entity history.

The Intelligence Center indexes published entities. This means that you can search for published entities, add published entities to datasets, add published entities to workspaces, and display published entities on the graph.

Published entities can have relationships. This means that you can edit, update, and download published entities at any time. However, you cannot revert a published entity back to a draft, and you can only delete a published entity if it has no existing relationships with any other objects in the Intelligence Center.

The basic published entity workflow enables deleting and editing.

About deleting entities

Deleting an entity fails in the following cases:

The entity is available only as draft, and it has not yet been published.
To delete it, you first need to publish it.
The entity is included in one or more datasets.
To delete it, you first need to remove it from the datasets it belongs to.
The entity is included in one or more public workspaces.
To delete it, you first need to remove it from the workspaces it belongs to.
There are open or pending user tasks referring to the entity.
To delete it, you first need to either complete and close, or delete the tasks that refer to the entity.
Another user copied the entity, and the entity data is currently stored in the user's clipboard.
To delete it, the copied entity data first needs to be removed from the user's clipboard.

Save and publish

To access additional save options, click the down arrow on the Save button:

To store your changes, click Save; to discard them, click Cancel.
To access additional save options, click the down arrow on the Save button:

Click Save draft to store your changes without publishing the entity.
Click Publish to release the new version of the entity that includes your changes.
Click Cancel to discard the changes.

Save a draft

Drafts are available in the entity editor under Draft entities.

Two additional options are available when saving an entity as a draft:

Click Save draft and new if you are creating a new entity and have not saved it before. This option saves the current populated form as a draft without publishing it to the Intelligence Center, and creates and opens a new draft form in the editor.
Click Save draft and duplicate to the current populated form as a draft without publishing it to the Intelligence Center, and create and opens a prepopulated copy of the draft entity in the editor to speed up the creation of a new entity of the same type.

Publish an entity

Published entities are saved to the Intelligence Center.
When the new entity is indexed, it is available in the Intelligence Center, in the entity editor under Published.
Published entities associated with a workspace or included in a dataset are available also through the corresponding workspace and dataset.

Two additional options are available when publishing an entity:

Click Publish and new if you are creating a new entity and you have not published it before. This option saves the current populated form, publishes it to the Intelligence Center, and creates and opens a new form in the editor.
Click Publish and duplicate to save the current populated form, publish it to the Intelligence Center, and create and open a prepopulated copy of the newly published entity in the editor to speed up the creation of a new entity of the same type.