15 Entity Lifecycle Management

Learn how to manage the publishing and the lifecycle status of catalog entities using initiatives.

Manage Entity Lifecycles Using Initiatives

All catalog entities are associated with an initiative. When the initiative’s lifecycle status changes, the status change is propagated to the entities that belong to the initiative. Pre-determined rules drive the lifecycle status transition in Launch Cloud Service. However, roles with the Change Lifecycle Status privilege can override the lifecycle status of an entity to any desired status.

An initiative goes through the following seeded lifecycle statuses. For example, consider two Launch environments: test and production.

Scenario 1 – Release a new product offer in the market

Test Instance

  1. In design: Your entities are being designed. You must confirm an initiative to move it to the next status.
  2. Ready to publish: This is an interim status, for the time between when you publish the initiative and when you receive confirmation from all of the spoke systems. When the confirmations are received, the initiative automatically transitions to the next status.
  3. In test: If you have successfully tested, you can move the initiative to Active, otherwise, you can move it back to In design status. Once you have QA approval, move the initiative to Active status.

  4. Active: You can use a migration job to migrate entities from test to production.

Production Instance

  1. In design: You can use migration job to migrate entities from test to production with the initiative in the In design status.
  2. Active: Manually change the status to Active. Publish the initiative to the production instance.
  3. Launched: In Launched status, the entities of that initiative are available in the external selling channels. In the test instance, you can manually change the initiative to Launched as well.

Scenario 2 – Revise a product offer to release to the market

Test Instance

  1. In design: Your entities are being designed. You must confirm an initiative to move it to the next status.
  2. Ready to publish: This is an interim status, for the time between when you publish the initiative and when you receive confirmation from all of the spoke systems. When the confirmations are received, the initiative automatically transitions to the next status.
  3. In test: If you have successfully tested, you can move the initiative to Active, otherwise, you can move it back to In design status. Once you have QA approval, move the initiative to Active status.

  4. Active: You can use a migration job to migrate entities from test to production.

Production Instance

  1. In design: Import the above initiative from the test environment and the initiative moves to the In design status.
  2. Active: Manually change the status to Active. Publish the initiative to production instance.
  3. Launched: In Launched status, the entities of that initiative are available in the external selling channels. In the test instance, you can manually change the initiative to Launched as well.

You can handle similar scenarios involving bug fixes and major releases in parallel using multiple test instances, or retiring or obsoleting an entity in the same manner as described above.

Note:

All content changes must be made in the test instance only, and not the production instance.

You can associate entities with an initiative only in the In Design status. You can design your product offer and add or remove entities. After your design is complete, you can confirm your initiative to move it to the Ready to publish status and you can no longer update your entities. After all the entities in an initiative are ready to be published, you can publish the initiative.

Optionally, you can also mandate approvals for your initiatives. For example, you can mandate that an initiative must go through an approval process before it moves to the Ready to publish status.

Lifecycle Stage and User Actions

The following table lists the actions that you can perform on catalog entities and the statuses in which they can be performed. You can transition between these lifecycle statuses by associating the entities with an initiative.

Table 15-1 List of User Actions on Product Offers

Actions Status Description

View

  • In design

  • Ready to publish

  • In test

  • Launched

  • Active

  • Retired

  • Rejected

You can view the offer details in a read-only mode. This serves as a snapshot of the catalog entity.

Edit

  • In design

You can open the catalog entity in an edit mode. This takes you through the guided UI flow.

Confirm

  • In design

  • In test

You can confirm your product catalog entity to move it to the Ready to test or Ready to publish statuses.

Clone

  • In design

  • Ready to publish

  • In test

  • Launched

  • Active

  • Retired

  • Rejected

Opens the Clone catalog entity dialog box and leads you to the guided UI flow.

Revise

  • Launched

You can create a revision of the launched catalog entity.

Retire

  • Launched

You can associate your product catalog entity with an initiative and the initiative can be retired.

Obsolete

  • Retired

You can obsolete a product catalog entity after it has been retired.

Publish

  • Ready to publish

You can publish your product catalog entity to a spoke system for testing.

Related Topics

Configure a New Lifecycle Status

Use this topic to learn how to create and manage new lifecycle statuses for entities and destinations for publishing.

As a product administrator, you can create and configure new lifecycle statuses in addition to the ones that are already shipped in the Launch application. Any new lifecycle status that needs to distribute the Initiative to one or more spoke systems and their specific workspaces/instances requires configuration of a Destination Entity.

Create a Destination

Destinations are spoke systems that consume initiative content. These can include CRM, billing, or commerce applications, each with its own instances. For example, a CRM application can have SIT, UAT, Pre-Production, and Production instances. To publish to these systems, configure them as destinations for a specific lifecycle status.

To create a new destination:

  1. Click the Administration tab, then click the Lifecycle status card, and then click Create on the Destinations card.
  2. Configure the following:
    • Domain Name: Specify the spoke system to publish to.
    • Domain Instance: Specify the instance of the spoke system.
    • Publish Sequence: Specify the sequence for this destination. If you have multiple destinations, this defines the order of publishing. For example, to publish to CRM, Commerce, Billing, and Provisioning in that order, you can set sequences 10, 20, 30, and 40, respectively. After a successful publish to CRM, the job proceeds to Commerce, then Billing, and finally Provisioning. It is recommended to leave gaps between sequence numbers to allow for future additions.
    • Internal: Enable this based on whether Launch handles the publish logic. For example, publishing to Siebel and PDC relies heavily on transformations managed by Launch, whereas publishing to Service Catalog and Design (SCD) is an event notification. SCD consumes the payload and performs its own transformations.
    • Design Time: Specify if there is another design time application that plays a role of cp-design catalog definitions along with Launch application. For spoke systems that consume catalog definitions directly from Launch, this can be skipped.
    • Add Rule: Specify entities to exclude entirely from publishing to this spoke system. Not all destinations require every catalog definition in an initiative. You can select entities to exclude for this destination, which removes the entire entity from being published to it.
    • Add Rule Group: Specify a subset of an entity to exclude from publishing to the spoke system. Use the criterion parameter, which has seeded first class properties of the entity, to define what should be restricted from publishing.
    • Exclude References: Enable this based on the entities specified in Add Rule or Add Rule Group. When enabled, any entity specified in Add Rule or Add Rule Group will also be excluded when referenced by other entities.

Create a Lifecycle Status

You can add lifecycle status only between In design and Launched lifecycle statuses. For example, you can add a testing phase, such as Unit Testing or UAT, after In Test and before the Active lifecycle status.

To create a new lifecycle status:

  1. Click the Administration tab, and then click Manage on the Lifecycle status card.

    The entity lifecycle status configuration version in active state appears.

  2. Select Save as New Version from the Save drop-down list.

  3. In the new version, click Create Status.

  4. On the New Status page, enter the status name.

  5. Select where you want to add the lifecycle status from the Create After drop-down list.

    A sequence number gets allocated to the status.

  6. In the Other Information section, define the next User Action.

  7. From the Error State drop-down list, select an error state for the status.

  8. Enable the following options as required:

    1. Edit Initiative: Specify if the initiative can be edited.

    2. Edit Initiative Entities: Specify if the initiative entities can be edited.

    3. Requires Approval: Specify if the initiative requires approval.

    4. Allow References in Other Initiatives: Specify if the initiative can be referred to in other initiatives.

    5. Enable Publish: Specify whether the new lifecycle status should be published to a new spoke system instance.

    6. Enable Sensitive: Specify whether the target spoke system instance is restricted to users with special privileges. This typically applies to Production or Pre-Production instances managed by the Operations team, while SIT or UAT instances can be accessed by users with the required roles. For more details on creating users with these privileges, see Set Up Users and Roles in Launch Cloud Service Implementation Guide.
    7. Destinations: Add the appropriate destination (spoke system and its instances) for the newly added lifecycle status.

  9. Click Create.

    Your new lifecycle status is active.

If you want to create more versions of the lifecycle status configuration, select Save as New Version on the Lifecycle Status page. After a new lifecycle status is activated, it's only applicable to the new entities that get created thereafter. Ensure that at any point in time, only one version is in Active status.

After you have created a new lifecycle status, you can create revisions, where you can add multiple lifecycle statuses as required and activate the new lifecycle configuration. Ensure that all the associated entities transition according to the lifecycle statuses defined in lifecycle workflow, in active state.

You can create a new lifecycle configuration from an Active lifecycle configuration only. Any newly created lifecycle creation will be in the Pending status and will need an activation process. When you activate a new lifecycle configuration, the current one is inactivated. The initiatives following the older, inactive configuration lifecycle will continue in that process. It's only the newly created initiatives that will follow the new lifecycle status configuration.

You can also define the conditions that control the lifecycle status transitions, such as:

  • Edit initiative: Specify if you can edit initiative entities.

  • Edit initiative entities: Specify if you can add or remove the initiative entities.

  • Requires Approval: Specify whether approval is required for a lifecycle transition.

  • Enable Publish: Specify if the status can be published to spoke systems.

  • Allow References in Other Initiatives: Specify if the catalog entity reference can be made in another initiative.

You must also specify the destination and the next user action for every status that you create.