Lifecycle States | tieback API Documentation

Every Digital Product Passport in tieback has a lifecycle state that determines its visibility, editability, and available governance actions.

States

State	Label in UI	Visibility	Governance actions available
`unpublished`	Draft	Brand team only	Publish
`published`	Published	Public (via scan or link)	Revoke, Controlled Update, Break-Glass
`revoked`	Revoked	No longer publicly served	Break-Glass only

State Transitions

Passports follow a forward-only progression:

Draft → Published → Revoked

Transition	Description
Publish	Makes the passport publicly accessible. The resolver begins serving this passport when consumers scan the product. A publication audit stamp is recorded, linking the passport to the active publication/template version at the time of publishing.
Revoke	Removes the passport from public access. The passport is no longer served by the resolver. Revocation applies to the digital passport object only — it does not cascade to physical carriers, unit identity, or token validity.

Transitions are irreversible: a published passport cannot be returned to Draft, and a revoked passport cannot be republished.

Who Can Transition

Lifecycle transitions require administrator-level permissions and are validated server-side via the transition_passport_lifecycle RPC, which enforces role checks and valid state progression.

Initial State

A passport’s initial state is determined at mint time. When a mint job completes, the resulting passport records are created in the unpublished (Draft) state.

Publication Audit Stamp

When a passport is published, tieback resolves the currently active publication through the passport assignment hierarchy and stamps that publication ID into the passport record. This creates a permanent audit record of which template/content version was in effect at the moment of publication.

This audit stamp is separate from the live resolver routing, which continues to use the dynamic assignment hierarchy to determine which passport to serve.

Revocation Scope

Revocation is strictly scoped to the digital passport object:

the passport is no longer served by the resolver
the passport record and its full history are retained
physical carriers (QR codes, NFC tags, RFID) are unaffected
mint unit identity and token validity are unaffected
Break-Glass amendments can still be applied to revoked passports