Each transaction constitutes a version of your application. When you first create a Designer application, the system creates your first work-in-progress transaction. Insofar as you are capable of editing the application’s user interface, you are acting upon a work-in-progress version of your application.
When you are modifying your application as part of your first transaction, there is no production version of your application. Your end users are not capable of accessing your application, entering or saving any data, or performing any calculations. You are free to make all of your modifications without fear that your changes will have an impact on your end users.
The process of turning your application over to your end users (i.e. finalizing and committing your transaction) is called Publishing. Publishing a transaction locks the transaction down and commits your changes to the production/published version of your application.
Until you publish your transaction, you will be able to freely leave the system and enter the design-mode of the application again. All changes that you make will be saved with your current work-in-progress transaction until that transaction is published.
Publishing a transaction is a permanent action – you will not be able to edit that transaction again. Instead, when you next want to make changes to your spreadsheet model or to your web interface, you will be prompted with a message indicating that there is no current work-in-progress transaction and that you can create a new transaction.
Upon starting a new transaction, all of your application’s data, changes, controls, and interface settings will be copied over to your new transaction, where you can freely make any and all additional changes. Changes made to your new transaction will not affect the production/published version of your application until you publish again.
This means that while you are in design-mode on the new work-in-progress transaction, you can make any changes without concern for how it will affect the current users of your application.
In this way, the system catalogues all of the changes that are made to your application over time and allows you to safely make modifications to your user interface without impacting your existing users.
If you have a work-in-progress transaction that you would like to remove, either for the purpose of starting again from the previous transaction as a baseline or because it was created unintentionally, any work-in-progress transactions (after the first publish) can always be deleted from the Transaction History screen in the Edit Application page of the SpreadsheetWeb Control Panel.
