Basic Lifecycle - questions about transitions

[davehaigh]

I'm looking at the OIR for WTDocuments and I see it defaults to the basic lifecycle.

So looking at the basic lifecycle I don't understand how this is supposed to work.
To me, the transitions seem all messed up.
I obviously don't understand how this supposed to work.

There is no Pending state to allow you to lock the file while it's being promoted.
What prevents changes to a document while it's being approved?

[cid:image002.png@01CDEE59.AE860090]
Why would you want to revise something that is "In Work"
Why would you want to promote something that is "In Work" to the "In Work" state?
Neither makes any sense to me.

[cid:image001.png@01CDEE5A.28661B20]
I understand Revise to "In Work"
I don't understand Promote to "In Work"
Also don't understand Promote to "Release" the state It's in already.

[cid:image003.png@01CDEE5A.79682C70]
None of these promotes at the Canceled level make any sense to me.
You are at the final release state; the only thing that makes sense is to revise.

David Haigh
Phone: 925-424-3931
Fax: 925-423-7496
Lawrence Livermore National Lab
7000 East Ave, L-362
Livermore, CA 94550

[SteveVinyard]

Hi David, I agree with everything you just said for most situations. Don't use the basic lifecycle. I don't have a single customer that uses this. It is just there as a dumb default for someone who maybe wants to demo something or just have the absolute basics in there 3 man team.

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Steve Vinyard
Application Engineer

[davehaigh]

I was assuming PTC had some logical use case behind this. I was hoping to find out what it was.

David Haigh

[ZacharyAlexande]

Hi David,

The out-of-the-box Basic lifecycle is often altered or not used. It is
meant as a bare-bones lifecycle that requires a Promote or Change action to
move from one state to another and where any Revise will push it back to In
Work.

Why would you want to revise something that is “In Work”:

Many companies use new revisions to reflect major changes that they make,
regardless of a state change. Without this Revise options, users would not
be able to create a new revision for objects that are "In Work".

Why would you want to promote something that is “In Work” to the “In Work”
state?

Obviously, you wouldn't. However, if you are promoting an entire assembly
to In Work (for whatever reason, maybe you don't want to create a new
revision) you would need to have all objects in the promotion request to
have the same destination life cycle state. For example, if some of an
assemblies' parts were in the Promotion Request and "In Work", they would
need to be able to be promoted from "In Work" to "In Work". This is the
same for Promotion to Released from Released.

Revise to In Work

Some companies, when they need to send a Released object back to the
drawing board, use the Revise option. This will update the revision and
move the state back to In Work.

Promote from Canceled

If you want to change the state of the Canceled object, do not wish to
create a new revision and would still like a formal approval of the state
change, promote is your best option.

In summary, I would not suggest using the OOTB Basic Lifecycle. I would
alter it to your needs and add an "Under Review" state that is set to the
Lock transition. This will make the objects un-editable as they go through
the approval process.

Hope this help clears it up.

Thank you,
Zack

Zachary D. Alexander
Systems Manager
ProductSpace Solutions Inc.
Phone: 630-495-2999 Ex. 8104
Cell: 630-460-4905

[jcrowe]

Good morning David,

Our company isdoing exactly what you asking for with our lifecycle process. Creating a custom lifecycle that prevents documents from being modified upon promotion request can be tedious.This is based on Windchill 9.0/9.1.

1.Lifecycle states - If your companyrequiresspecific standards with state names that aren't provided out of the box inWindchill, you will need to create custom states. If not, life will be one step easier.

Note: The Lock transitiondoes NOTguarantee that the object is read-only. You will most likely need to set permission to on the lock state(i.e. 'Pending') via Policy Administrator to ensure that the object type is read-only.

Overall, it's not a walk in the park especially on a system that's been around for some time.

Give me a call when you get into office. In the meantime, I'll see if I can work up a how-to document with more details.