Document stages

This chapter is technical and as a regular user, you don´t have to understand this chapter in detail.

On some Link screens, you can read the term “Area” which refers to different internal document processing stages in Link. This is particularly useful to know about when reading the many logging details available on the Document detail page.

As seen in the figure below, there are several different areas a document must go through on its journey from receival to sending.

We will explain them one by one.

Polling

The Polling area refers to the scenarios where an Incoming transport location has been set up and is fetching a document.

Receive

This area refers to the stage a document is in while it is in the process of being received by one of the Link receive sites. These are REST and SOAP APIs and (if set up in your case) the AS2 and/or AS4 endpoints.

Initialize

The “initialize” stage is extremely important and is where a lot of the magic in Link happens. Link will sort out which document type the received document has, who the sender partner is, who the receiving partner is and a lot more. The most important purpose of the initialize step is determining which distribution the document belongs to and associate all the belonging itinerary steps to it.

Itinerary

When the document is in the Itinerary stage, it is in the process of going through a distribution. Typically this involves document transformations (mapping), but it could also involve more advanced components - they can even be custom made. This is functionality geared towards developers and therefore, won´t be discussed further in this text.

Send

This stage refers to the last part of a document journey through Link and then the final delivery (sending) to it’s designated outbound location, which is configured on the distribution.

Event

The event stage is an advanced topic and will be covered in this guide.