About Statuses and Stages
A Business Object lifecycle comprises statuses, stages, and transitions.
At a minimum, you need two statuses and one stage to make up a lifecycle. One of the stages must be marked as the final stage.
Statuses
Use statuses to describe each step that an item has to go through in a lifecycle in order to complete a business process. For example, an Incident could have multiple statuses including: Open, In Progress, In Test, and Closed. After adding a status, you see a default status name (example: Status 2) inside the box that you can then change to fit your lifecycle. It can be useful to think about statuses as being adjectives that describe the current state of a record.
- A status can only be associated with one stage.
- You cannot have duplicate status names (example: Open, OPEN and open are duplicates).
- Status names can be 1 - 32 characters in length.
Stages
Use stages to group statuses together (example: statuses Approval and Rejected could be part of stage Authorization). After adding a status to a lifecycle, the stage or grouping is the name shown across the top of the box.
Within each box/stage, you associate a status.
- A stage can be associated with one or more statuses.
- You cannot have duplicate stage names (example: Authorization, AUTHORIZATION and authorization are duplicates).
- Stage names can be 1 - 32 characters in length.