Templates in Benchling’s Notebook allow you to quickly create pre-formatted ELN entries for repeated workstreams that require consistent data entry that is standardized across your organization. 

Template publishing is a feature that allows you to create and store templates and sub-templates that are under development in a draft format in your Template Collection, only making it available to the relevant end-users upon finalization by publishing it. 

Template States 

Templates are with a version state to indicate their status. There are four version states that are used to designate where a template is in its lifecycle. The table below provides a brief description of each version state, permissions, and an overview of if a version state can be used by end-users.

Template permissions are described in more detail in the linked article and are not impacted by using version states. 

Draft to Published

The version of a new template, whether made by cloning from a previous version or creating a net-new template, defaults to draft. When you are ready to publish the template use the following steps: 

1. Click on the Draft dropdown in the upper right corner and click Publish version
2. Optionally update the display name and description if necessary
   • Note: If you are publishing for the first time you will need to provide a display name, for each update Benchling will auto-increment the display name (ex. Version 1 to Version 2)
3. Click the Publish button 

You can opt out of the default auto-incrementing of display names, but this will require you to input a custom name each time you publish a new draft. 

Create New Draft

If you are ready to iterate on a template and update it, you must create a new draft as you cannot make changes to the effective version of a template. To create a new draft use the following steps: 

1. Click on the Version dropdown and click create new draft
   
   
   
   
2. Make updates and changes in that draft
3. When ready to publish, click the Version draft dropdown
4. Confirm that you would like to publish the version by clicking the Publish button 

When a version is published it supersedes the prior effective version, this however does not affect Entries created from the superseded version. All new entries will be made from the newly published effective version. 

Withdrawn

If you want to withdraw a template, for instance if it contains errors, you will remove it from circulation and there will be no effective version of that template for users. To withdraw a template use the following steps: 

1. Click on the Version dropdown and click Withdraw version 
2. Confirm that you would like to withdraw the version by clicking the Withdraw button 

Version History 

The version history panel is designed to display the template’s history and primary metadata. You can view the version history of a template in the template history panel at the right side. The Panel will display all effective versions with the newest version at the top. If any new drafts exist, they will be displayed above the latest effective version.

Version metadata is available in the Warehouse and can be used to provide deeper operational insights to different processes. 

Updates to version history via publishing are tracked in audit logs. For every publish action, at least four audit events are generated: 

• created publishing record
• update version name
• update version description
• update publishing status

If a version is superseded by a publishing action, an additional audit event is generated: updated publishing status.