Approvals terminology

A user requests *a change*, e.g. adding an assignment of a role to him (or to somebody else).

Such a change is either carried out immediately, or an approval process has to be executed for it.

Approval process results in either approving or rejecting the change. (In future, the result can be also a modification of the change.) This result is called an outcome.

Approval process itself consists of zero, one or more work items.

A work item is a decision task offered to a user or a group of users (candidate actors), among which exactly one completes the work item (the actor). The one who completed the work item is called an approver. (The term object’s approver is also used to denote user/org that is expected to approve a change related to an object.)

Work item can be either not allocated, i.e. offered to a group of users (candidate actors), or allocated, i.e. allocated (or assigned - but we try to avoid use of this word, because it is used in midPoint in other sense) to a single user. If not allocated, each of candidate actors can claim the work item. If allocated (and having at least one candidate actor) it can be released by the current actor.

Work item has two possible outcomes: approve or reject. (In future there could be also a delegate outcome and perhaps something like abstain = "I don’t know".)

An (attempted) operation that consists of one or more changes. In our case, the operation consists of 5 changes.

Each change becomes an approval request, causing approval process to be executed.

…​and the rest is as before: each approval process has its outcome. So the resulting change is a combination of 2 changes that do not require approvals, and 0-3 changes that are approved by the 3 approval processes executed.

A certification case is an item (effect of some change that occurred in the past) that has to be certified (evaluated), i.e. whose fate has to be determined by manual inspection.

Certification of the cases is carried out in batches, called campaigns. Campaigns are internally organized into stages; each campaign has one or more of these.

At the start of each stage, each certification case gets zero, one or more reviewers. They are responsible for providing a certification **decision (or decision) for each assigned case. Decision consists of a response (accept, revoke, reduce, no decision, delegate) and a comment.

For each stage, individual decisions are combined to provide an outcome for given case in a given stage. Outcomes in individual stages are combined into an overall outcome for a given case (in given campaign).