Life cycle diagrams

It is difficult to understand the relationships between actions and states by reading a description like the preceding one. The relationships are usually much easier to understand when they appear in a diagram. The following figure shows a type of diagram called a life cycle diagram that illustrates the relationship between the states and events discussed in the preceding paragraph.

The boxes in the figure represent the states of the record. The vertical lines under the boxes help show transitions between the states. The arrows between the lines represent transitions from one state to another; these transitions are called state transition actions. The words in the arrows are the labels users see for the station transition actions that cause the transitions.

When any state transition action is invoked, the system saves the record, regardless of the state transition action's name.

The odd shape that looks like the tail end of an arrow (such as the Marketing Delay transition in the figure) indicates a transition from a state to the same state. A state transition that does not go anywhere may seem pointless at first. The value of such a transition has to do with the fact that when a transition happens, it causes the record to be saved and may call a workflow and/or set the values of fields. Read more about workflows in "Overview of workflows".