Life cycle transitions

Every state in a life cycle has a set of state transition actions associated with it. When a record is being edited by a form, the state transition actions are included in the form's action buttons. When you see actions such as Save or Save & Close in a form's action buttons, it is because the record's current state has state transition actions that can be triggered by those action buttons.

State transition actions also can trigger events. See "Launch conditions" for more details.

Note: The state-transition temporary support for validations should avoid using Trigger Action tasks that call state transitions, which call custom actions (such as platform Enterprise JavaBeans (EJBs)). The reason is that some of the custom action implementations can save temporary data as part of their work.

Synchronous workflows can be triggered by a state transition action and asynchronous workflows can be triggered by the event generated in response to the state transition action. See Synchronous versus asynchronous workflows for a discussion.

The same state transition action name may have a different meaning depending on a record's state. In the previous figure, we see the action named Abandon meaning different things, depending on the current state of the business object. If the state is Work in Progress or PrePublication, the result of Abandon is that the state of the business object becomes Abandoned. If the current state of the business object is Published, the result of Abandon is that the state of the business object becomes Out of Print.