After a find leaves the ground it moves through a series of processing steps, and pipelineStage records which step it is at right now. A newly cataloged artifact starts at the default value FIELD. The full set of stages comes from the tenant's TenantConfig.pipelineStages, which defaults to FIELD, WASHING, SORTING, CATALOGING, ANALYSIS, PHOTOGRAPHY, and STORAGE. Advancing the stage as work is completed lets a lab see at a glance what still needs washing, cataloging, or photography, and reports can summarize progress across a whole project.
Technical section
Data model, API, and internals — visible to developers.