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Working safely with the chat assistant

The chat assistant works on your real content. Its tools are described in Chat assistant. This page is about working with it safely: which actions happen at once, which ones you can undo, and how to ask.

Saving and publishing happen at once​

When the assistant saves or publishes a page, it does so without a confirmation card. Your message is the permission. The assistant also treats a clear yes as an instruction: if it says "if this is fine, I publish it" and you answer "fine", it publishes.

  • A new page is a draft unless you ask to publish it, and the assistant asks which you want. The assistant also keeps a new page out of the menu, unless the page belongs in the navigation.
  • A change to a published page is saved as a draft. The live page keeps its old values until you publish.
  • A copy of a page is always a draft.
  • Moving a published page changes its address. The assistant warns you first.

We recommend saying in your request what the end state must be, for example "save it as a draft" or "do not publish yet". A page that is published is live on your site immediately.

Deleting goes to the recycle bin​

When you ask the assistant to delete a page, the page and everything beneath it move to the recycle bin, and you can restore them from there. The assistant never empties the recycle bin. A page with subpages is only deleted after you have confirmed that the subpages go with it, and by default the assistant asks you first, naming the page and the number of subpages. It is told never to delete anything as a side effect of another request, such as tidying up or rewriting a page.

This is different from deleting an idea on the Ideas screen, which removes the page for good. See Reviewing before publishing.

Let Umbraco decide who may do what​

The chat tools of Aivie work with the rights of the person who uses them. If an editor should prepare pages but not put them live, take the publish permission away from that editor in Umbraco, for the user group or for a part of the content tree. The tools of Aivie then cannot publish for that person either, and the assistant says that it is not allowed. The same goes for deleting, moving and copying, and for the parts of the site that are outside someone's start nodes. You do not have to set anything up in Aivie for this. See The assistant follows your Umbraco rights.

Keep requests small and concrete​

We recommend:

  • One page and one change per request. Name the page, and say what it should look like when it is done.
  • Several pages one after the other, not in one request. "Rewrite the whole section" is hard to check, "rewrite the intro of this page" is not.
  • Not stopping the assistant halfway. If you start a new conversation or leave the page while it works, Aivie asks you to confirm, because an aborted task can leave work half done, such as a page that was created but not filled. Waiting is almost always better.
  • Checking the result in the content tree before you publish, just as you would for a colleague's work.

Going back​

Umbraco keeps earlier versions of a page for a limited time, so a change to a page can be rolled back from the page in the content editor. The recycle bin brings back a deleted page. Check this on your own site before you rely on it, because how long versions are kept depends on the settings of your Umbraco site.

Media is different. In Umbraco, media items have no version history, and the assistant can replace the file of an existing media item. The new file then shows on every page that uses that item. When you are not sure, ask for a new image to be added instead of an existing one being replaced.