Jon,
The situation where this arises for us is with addressing. I am sometimes asked to calculate house numbers and then there is some sort of delay necessary before making them official. We are usually not incredibly busy from an addressing standpoint so most of the time I can simply delay the post to default.
There have been a few times that in the interim another address assignment or two has come up that needs to be posted right away. At that point, we discuss and make one of two decisions:
- Post everything but delay the official announcement. Not ideal if I get a data request for our site address layer before everything is official!
- Move the unofficial addresses to a separate layer and delete them from the primary layer so that posting can commence. The danger is that I might forget to add them back when they get officially announced.
I've contemplated the idea of creating a separate version for every address assignment or group of addresses (i.e. all of the newly assigned addresses for a subdivision), but the number of times this issue occurs doesn't seem to warrant adding that extra layer of complexity. That might be different if there were more than one editor for this data.
I may be reading too much into your initial post, but are you saying that for a particular unit of work (i.e. the PDF or CAD dataset) only a portion of the features might be desired to be posted? Or are you saying that you may only want to post the edit for one dataset even though you have a requirement to enter all of the datasets? I know some organizations use versions to capture working alternatives and some of those never become the end result but are still used in the analysis/review stages of their project. Multiple versions would work for the latter scenario but not for the former. And I suspect that you've already evaluated that workflow.
A thought that just popped into my head is: Are you able to evaluate beforehand which features should be posted and which should not? If so, maybe splitting the work into different versions could work. We don't know enough specific info about what you are dealing with to really say if that is viable or not, but you can evaluate that idea for appropriateness. I don't know, either, if that may create feature conflicts where the conflict resolution process is invoked.
Brian