Review Mode
Review Mode is the full-screen workbench for deciding held fields on a data product. The source document fills the center, and the decision rail on the right lists what needs a decision for the current row, with the value, the verdicts that held it, candidate values, and the approve, correct, or override form. It is the same workbench whether you arrive from Products, from the direct-URL queue, or from an app, so reviewers learn one set of gestures for every surface.
Opening Review Mode from Products
Products is the review hub. The Products list shows a Status column (Needs review or Complete), and the Products entry in the sidebar carries a dot when any product has fields waiting. Open a product and choose Review Mode, or open a single row in Review Mode from the product grid. The header shows how many fields are left to review (or "All validated"), your position in the product ("3 of 40"), and Previous and Next controls to walk from one data product row to the next without returning to the list.
When several reviewers share a product, the header tells you who else is working: a row someone else has open reads In review by with their name, and Your batch shows how many rows are reserved for you against other reviewers. A reservation is a courtesy, not a lock: you can still browse and review every row. The Log tab beside Review shows the decisions already taken on the row, so you can see what a colleague decided before you continue.
The decision rail
The rail opens on Fields to review: every field on the row that still needs a decision. Selecting a field moves the document view to its source and shows the value, its confidence, the verdicts behind the hold, and any candidate values from other documents. Only my fields hides the fields you are not allowed to decide, which is useful for a Member working through a product that also contains senior-only fields. Decided fields move to Validated and the row counts down to "All validated".
Enum fields get a picker with every allowed value in Spec order, including codes no source produced, which are badged as an allowed value. A closed enum offers a select; an open enum offers a text input with suggestions. A decision is not final: Edit on a validated field reopens it, and the revision writes a new decision row while keeping the earlier one in the log.
Compare across linked documents
A data product row is often built from several documents: an Anchor document that seeds the row and Amendments that override selected fields during assembly. Compare on a field opens a popover with the value each of the row's documents states for that field, next to the value the data product delivers. It answers the common review question "which document is this value from, and what did the others say?" without leaving the field.
For a wider view, the document switcher has a compare toggle on every non-Anchor document. Selected documents open a side-by-side comparison table in the document pane: one row per field, the Anchor first, then each added document, then a Data product column with the delivered value. Cells that differ from the Anchor are tinted. Clicking a field name shows its description and notes; clicking a value shows that document's own cell in the rail, read-only, with a way back to the review item. Decisions always stay on the Anchor's cell.
Pinned fields
Some fields give context to every decision on a row, such as a contract number, a counterparty, or a start date. A Senior Member or Admin can pin such a field: hover its row in the rail and choose Pin to the top of every review. Every reviewer then sees a collapsible Pinned section above Fields to review, showing the pinned fields with the current row's values. A pin only adds the field on top; it keeps its place in its own section, decides nothing, and is skipped on products that do not carry the field.
Pins are a workspace setting, optionally narrowed to one Spec. Everyone can read them; only Senior Member and above can pin or unpin. Each reviewer's browser remembers whether the Pinned section is collapsed. The app manages pins through the session endpoint /review-pinned-fields, which is not part of the public /v1 API.
Header-tagged fields
Field tags on the Spec change how Review Mode presents a field. A field tagged header shows its value as a read-only badge beside the document name, written as label · value (or a dash when empty). Badges follow column order; the first three render and the rest fold into a +N badge. Use it for identifying values such as a document number or customer reference, so a reviewer always knows which document they are on. The header tag has no effect on processing. A field tagged complex is locked to senior reviewers, as described below. Both tags are matched case-insensitively.
Search in the document
The search box above the document finds matches in the PDF view itself, so you keep the original layout instead of switching to text. Scanned PDFs have no text layer, so Review Mode searches them through the OCR word boxes that also locate highlighted sources: matches are painted on the page in place. Matching folds case and accents and finds substrings across words, so "term" also hits "contract term" and a phrase can span several words, but it is never fuzzy. Pages are read top-down a few at a time, so the first matches appear quickly on long scans. Images are not searched.
Under the search box, suggested search chips help you find a value faster. Colleagues found this with lists up to three phrases whose searches led reviewers to decisions on the same field for documents of the same type, each with how often it led to a decision and the page where the value usually is, such as "7× led to a decision · usually p. 2". A phrase becomes a suggestion only after it preceded at least three distinct decisions. The best learned phrase is painted on the document before you type, but it is not recorded as a search unless you click it. When nothing has been learned yet, Try searching for offers phrases from the field's name, description, and notes. A typed term that finds nothing gets a hint with the phrase colleagues usually use.
Raw search terms can contain names and amounts, so they are kept only for a limited time: the daily retention sweep deletes raw search rows after 180 days by default, while the aggregate suggestions built from them remain.
Non-PDF originals
Not every source is a PDF. Review Mode opens photos (with zoom and pan), TIFF scans, Word documents, and spreadsheets in their original form through the same viewers the Documents page uses, labelled Original. These viewers have no located highlight for a field, so the pane opens on the extracted Text view and you switch to Original when you want to see the file. If an original cannot be loaded, the pane falls back to Text, the same as a PDF that fails to load.
Complex fields and Recommend
A field tagged complex can be decided only by a Senior Member (shown in the app as Senior Contract Management) or an Admin; the server rejects anyone else with a 403, and the rail shows a lock with a "Senior+" chip. A Member who opens such a field gets Recommend {action} instead of the decision form: they choose the value and action they would take, and the field shows "Recommended by" them. The senior reviewer can adopt it with Use recommendation, which pre-fills the decision and justification, and the confirmed decision credits the recommender in the decision log.
Rules in the rail when opened from an app
When you open Review Mode from an app, for example from a held decision in the app's results, the app's rules come along. The rail gains a Rules section listing the rules that touch the row's Anchor document, and each field shows Rules on this field. Every rule outcome has a plain-language reason: Passed (the document meets the rule, with the conditions under which it would fail), Failed (with the clause that failed), Unclear (because a field the rule needs is still under review, a value is empty, or the automatic check could not decide), or not applicable to this document. Deciding the held field is often what turns an Unclear rule into a pass or fail. See Operating an App.