Workflow auto publish on intermediate state

Question

Is is possible to perform autopublish of item on intermediate, not final state of sitecore workflow?

Sitecore 9.0.1, Admin user.
I have custom workflow with the following states:

1. Editing
   • Submit
2. Reviewing
   • Approve (autopublish item to web database)
     • Auto Publish Action
   • Reject (move item to Editing)
3. Published
   • Approve (autopublish item to production database)
     • Auto Publish Action
   • Reject (move item to Editing)
4. On Production (final state)

When item goes from Reviewing -> Published state (by approval) - it's not being autopublished. It works only from Published -> On Production.
I've tried to achieve this by Sitecore.Workflows.Simple.PublishAction

I also tried to wrote custom processor for this and do publish via code:

PublishManager.PublishItem(dataItem, targets, master, isDeep, false, publishRelated);  

or

var po = new PublishOptions(master,
                           targetDb,
                           PublishMode.SingleItem,
                           lang,
                           System.DateTime.Now);
po.RootItem = dataItem;

Publisher publisher = new Publisher(po);
publisher.Publish();

Code executes, but nothing publishes, no errors in logs.

Is it even possible?

Answer 1

The piece you're missing is that on that intermediate workflow state (Reviewing, in your example) you need to set the Preview publishing targets field:

Check your web target in that field for your Reviewing state and the auto-publish action should work as expected.

Note: if your target does not show up in this list, you may need to navigate to the publishing targets (/sitecore/system/publishing targets) and check the Preview publishing target checkbox: