Transition Defaults

Life cycle transition defaults are applied whenever a life cycle is saved (either interactively or via a bulk load) or is upgraded and does not otherwise contain explicit transition information.

Default transitions are initialized according to a specification recorded in the wt. properties file. The specification is encoded using a small language, whose grammar is given (beginning with a valid wt.properties entry):

wt.lifecycle.transitions.default.<transition_name>=<expression_list>

transition_name = { key element of wt.lifecycle.Transition }

expression_list = expression ["," expression_list]

expression = term ["|" expression]

term = "ALL" | "FIRST" | "LAST" | state_name

state_name = "\"" { key element of wt.lifecycle.State } "\""

Each property entry specifies a rule for creating default instances of a particular transition type in each life cycle. The rule is applied to a state in a life cycle. Every expression in the expression_list is evaluated to create transitions to the specified states. However, each term in the expression is evaluated in order of appearance only until one is encountered that validly specifies one or more states; the remaining terms in the expression are ignored.

The out-of-the-box default transition expressions are:

wt.lifecycle.transitions.default.PROMOTE=ALL

wt.lifecycle.transitions.default.CHANGE="RELEASED"

wt.lifecycle.transitions.default.REVISE=FIRST

These rules can be interpreted as follows:

•PROMOTE: create a PROMOTE transition from each state to all other states in every life cycle.

•CHANGE: create a CHANGE transition from each state to the RELEASED state in every life cycle. If the life cycle does not have a RELEASED state, no transition is defined.

•REVISE: create a REVISE transition from each state to the first state in every life cycle.