Every document in Vault has a lifecycle that manages its behavior as the document transitions from draft through reviews, approvals, and eventual replacement or archiving. A lifecycle is composed of one or more states with business logic and associated workflows. Lifecycles in Vault allow you to configure business logic that traditionally required custom coding or long manual processes through a series of point-and-click administration screens that are easy to update as business processes change.
Accessing Lifecycles
Lifecycles are visible and editable from Admin > Configuration > Document Lifecycles. You must have the correct Admin permissions through your security profile to create and modify lifecycles.
The Lifecycles page lists all lifecycles currently in the system. You can create new lifecycles by clicking Create or edit an existing lifecycle by clicking the lifecycle’s name.
About Inactive & Active Status
Lifecycle states, workflows, and lifecycles themselves have a status flag to indicate Active or Inactive. This flag allows you to build all the artifacts for the lifecycle before making it visible to users. Any change to an active lifecycle is immediately reflected for all users. Thus, it is important to ensure that changes to production systems are made cautiously. We recommend that you thoroughly test any change in a similarly configured testing Vault and that you make changes to an inactive mirrored lifecycle in the production Vault and then swap the active and inactive lifecycles at the same time.
Lifecycle Options
Lifecycle options and settings are separated into tabs on the lifecycle details page.
- Details
- Modify basic settings for the lifecycle itself; details below.
- States
- See and modify all lifecycle states within the lifecycle.
- Event Actions
- Configure actions that take place automatically when a user creates a document, copies a document, or creates a new draft of an existing document.
- Workflows
- Configure workflows for the lifecycle.
- Roles
- See and modify all user roles (standard and custom) available within the lifecycle.
- Expiration
- Define document expiration rules for the lifecycle.
- eSignature Pages
- Select a template for signature page which Vault will attach to downloaded renditions.
Lifecycle Details Tab
The Details tab lists the information that applies to the lifecycle itself across all states.
- Lifecycle Name
- Unique name of the lifecycle. It will appear to end users if they have to select a lifecycle to apply to a document.
- Description
- Description or comments about the lifecycle. This is used only in this Admin section and not visible to end users.
- Status
- Inactive or Active. Only Active lifecycles can be assigned to documents in Vault. All lifecycles are initially created with a status of Inactive and can be made Active only if all the lifecycle’s states are created and valid and at least one Document Type is assigned.
- Document Type
- One or more document types, subtypes, or classifications are associated with a particular lifecycle (this association occurs within Document Type configuration). This relationship drives which lifecycles are available when a user create a new document. Every document type must have at least one lifecycle assigned to it. This field is required before a lifecycle is made Active.
- State Types
- State types are generalized states that link to a configured lifecycle state. The linked states then have some specialized behaviors. For example, Vault doesn’t allow users to delete a document in its lifecycle’s Steady state. Learn about state types.
- Signature Page Template
- Template for signature page which Vault will attach to downloaded renditions.