Changing a CI lifecycle assignment

Changing a CI lifecycle assignment means applying a new CI lifecycle to a CI classification, deleting the assignment of a CI lifecycle to a CI classification, or changing the default lifecycle. In any of these cases, the status of some configuration items might be modified.

Every CI classification has a lifecycle applied to it, either a lifecycle that you have applied or the default lifecycle. This lifecycle defines a set of states that the configuration items (CIs) of that classification can have. Whenever you change the lifecycle that is assigned to a CI classification, it is possible that the new lifecycle might not contain all the states that CIs currently have. You can change the lifecycle that is assigned to a CI classification by taking any of these actions:

Applying a different lifecycle to a CI classification
Deleting the assignment of a lifecycle to a CI classification
Changing the default lifecycle

When you click Save after completing any of these actions, the current state of all the CIs in the affected classifications will be checked. If there are any CIs whose current state does not exist in the new lifecycle, a message will appear notifying you of this and giving you a choice. You can:

Click Yes to continue with the change, in which case all the CIs whose current states do not exist in the new lifecycle will be changed to the default state of the new lifecycle.
Click No to cancel the change, review the list of CIs, and determine whether to move them to different states or perhaps add their current state to the new lifecycle.

Warning: if you assign a new lifecycle to a classification by any of these methods, and there is a large number of CIs in that classification whose current status does not exist in the new lifecycle, the status of all of those CIs will be modified in a single database operation. If this operation involves thousands of CIs, you might see a database error saying that the maximum number of open cursors has been exceeded. In this case, you might need to increase the maximum number of open cursors in your database. As an alternative, you could modify the old lifecycle to add a state with the name of the state in the new lifecycle to which you want to move a lot of CIs, and move the CIs to that state in the old lifecycle, in groups if necessary, before you change the lifecycle assignment. This will prevent the product from attempting to update the status of all the CIs at once.

A CI's lifecycle can also be modified by changing the classification of the CI in the Configuration Items application. If you change a CI to a new classification, and its current state does not exist in the lifecycle that is assigned to its new classification, a message will appear notifying you of this and giving you a choice. You can:

Click Yes to assign the CI to the default state of its new lifecycle
Click No to leave the CI in its current state. If you choose this option, the CI's status will be invalid; you must change the CI to a valid state in its new lifecycle before you can work with it in any way, such as changing an attribute.

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