Automatic Transition Rules
You can define rules that automatically transition a case into a different state. For example, you can indicate a literature request should be transitioned to the Follow Up state 1 week after the literature is sent. Similarly, you can indicate a high-bill complaint should transition to the Decision Checkpoint state after the fieldwork is complete. These rules are held in algorithms that are plugged in on the case type and therefore you can define any type of automatic transition rules.
Cases in a state with automatic transition rules are monitored by the CASETRAN background process. Each time this program runs, the respective automatic transition plug-in is called for each such case and it transitions the case if the condition applies.
When to execute CASETRAN. Because your automatic transition rules will be dependent on your business requirements, you need to think carefully about when you run the CASETRAN background process. For example, if you have automatic transition rules that transition a case to a new state when a related field activity is completed, you would want to schedule this job to run after field activities are uploaded. If you have rules to transition a case after a customer pays a deposit, you'd want to schedule this job to run after payments are uploaded. Bottom line - your business rules will dictate the frequency of execution.
When the user adds a new case or changes the state of a case manually the system attempts to auto-transition the case to subsequent statuses as necessary. If auto-transition rules apply to the new state (and to subsequent ones) they would be executed right away. In other words, you don't need to wait for the auto-transition background process to be executed. An indication that the case was auto-transitioned online is displayed right below the action buttons section.
Auto-Transition Errors. Online auto-transition is performed recursively committing each successful state transition to the database. It is performed up to 100 times or until an error is encountered during the process. If this happens, auto-transition stops at the last non-transitory state into which a successful transition had occurred. Two case log entries will be generated automatically - one containing the message that a transition error has occurred, and a second containing the actual error message. A To Do entry will also be generated automatically upon rollback. The type of this To Do entry will be taken from 1) the Case Transition Exception To Do Type option for the Business Object associated with the case type, and if this is not populated, 2) the Exception To Do Type indicated on the Case Options Feature Configuration. All of the above error handling is true for both batch and online processing of cases.
Triggering Auto-Transition. If you have a customized process that affects the state of a case and you want the case to be auto-transitioned right away, i.e. not wait for the next scheduled CASETRAN background process to execute, you can customize that process to trigger auto-transition for the specific case, or you can put the state transition logic into the routines that execute at state entry time.