Managing Transitions includes the following topics:
A transition is a pair of lifecycle states between which it is possible to action the object. For each possible transition, you specify one or more roles. A user must have one of these roles in order to action the object from the from state to the to state.
In addition to this, there are two options associated with each role for a transition:
Optional. If this option is set, this means that actioning an object to the transition's from state does not require there to be a user holding that role.
If this option is not set, the actioning will be disallowed if there are no users holding that role.
Pending. If this option is set, the object will appear in the user's inbox, and the user will receive an email notification when the object is actioned to the from state for the transition.
If this option is not set, it will not appear in the user's inbox and the user will not receive email notification, but the user will still be able to perform the action.
For further details and an example, see Assigning Pending and Optional Roles.