Publishing is how your work reaches everyone else. Until you publish, changes to your semantic layer live in your working copy — your workbooks and dashboards carry on using the last published version.
Before you start: you’ve made and saved some changes. If you’re unsure how saving and publishing differ, read How versioning works first.
Publish now
Click Publish in the toolbar.
Result: your semantic layer goes live, and everything reading from it picks up your changes. A version is recorded at that point, so you can always come back to exactly what you published.
Choose when publishing happens
Next to Publish is a dropdown with three choices:
Manual — never publish automatically. You decide when. This is the default.
Delayed — publish after 30 seconds without changes. Publishes once you’ve paused.
Instant — publish after every saved change. Every saved edit goes straight out.
Your choice is remembered in your browser.
Tip: stay on Manual for a semantic layer other people depend on. It lets you make a series of related changes and release them as one coherent update, instead of pushing half-finished work to everyone downstream. Reach for Instant when you’re experimenting on your own and want to see the effect in a workbook immediately.
When Publish is greyed out
Next to Publish you’ll see Issues with a count. These are problems the editor has found in your semantic layer, and while any are unresolved, Publish is unavailable and carries a warning marker.
This is on purpose. Publishing pushes your model to everyone using it, so the editor won’t release one it knows is broken.
Hover the greyed-out Publish and it tells you exactly what’s holding it up — for example Resolve 7 semantic-layer validation issues before publishing.
1. Click Issues to see the list. 2. Work through them. 3. Return to Publish — it becomes available again once they’re cleared.
Your work is saved the whole time. A blocked publish never costs you anything; it just waits.
If a publish doesn’t go through
Occasionally a publish fails — a connection drops, or something changed underneath you. The editor tells you, and offers to try again. Your changes stay saved in your working copy throughout, so nothing is lost while you sort it out.
If the reason isn’t obvious, the message can be expanded to show the underlying detail, which is the thing to quote if you need to raise it with support.
If someone changed the live model elsewhere
Your semantic layer can also be edited outside this editor. When that happens, the editor notices as you open the layer and pauses automatic publishing rather than quietly overwriting that work.
You’ll be asked whether to bring the changed model in.
Importing doesn’t overwrite anything. Your existing work is kept as a version, the incoming model becomes the next version, and both sit in Version history for you to compare.
Nothing is merged automatically and nothing is lost — you decide what to keep using the normal compare and restore controls. You’ll see the two versions named for you, one either side of the import.
If you decline, both states are kept exactly as they are and automatic publishing stays paused. You can carry on editing, and publish manually once you’ve decided. A manual publish in that state is a deliberate overwrite, so make sure it’s the outcome you want.
You’re most likely to meet this with a semantic layer built in the older editor, the first time you open it here.
If the check can’t complete, the editor says so and lets you retry. It won’t assume someone changed something just because it couldn’t tell.
Next: Go back to an earlier version if you need to undo something you’ve published.