Every Digital Product Passport in tieback has a lifecycle state that determines its visibility, editability, and available governance actions.
Passports follow a forward-only progression:
Transitions are irreversible: a published passport cannot be returned to Draft, and a revoked passport cannot be republished.
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.
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 When a mint job completes, the resulting passport records are created in the unpublished (Draft) state.
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 is strictly scoped to the digital passport object: