Approval workflow triggers on activation; publishing survey automatically activates. We want to be able to publish without activating. | Experience Community
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Approval workflow triggers on activation; publishing survey automatically activates. We want to be able to publish without activating.

  • July 21, 2026
  • 1 reply
  • 10 views

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We want to build an approval workflow so that regular trigger an approval request when they attempt to activate a survey. However Qualtrics automatically activates surveys when they are published.

We want people to be able to publish multiple times without activating. (This is partly because the comment box while publishing is useful, and people like to know they have finalized their changes.) 

We would like publishing and activation to be two different things, which they used to be many years ago right after the “publish” feature was introduced.

We tried disabling the “Activate” option in the permissions, but then it appears that people cannot publish either.

In any case, without activate permission, how would the approval ever be triggered?  

1 reply

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  • Author
  • Level 2 ●●
  • July 21, 2026

Correction: Actually it seems like the reverse. Approvals are based on publishing, not activation. But if we only trigger approval on the first publish event, the survey is probably nowhere near final. And if we trigger it on every publish event, that’s a deluge of approval requests. Activation should be when you actually plan to send out the survey; publishing should just be latest version.