topic Re: Best Practice for Actions in Product Forum

Best Practice for Actions

AndrewPascal — Thu, 25 Jan 2024 12:25:03 GMT

I'm reviewing our coding standards and would like some clarification on the use of actions, please.

We currently ban Actions from calling other Actions in the same Business Object. The reason is, basically, that a second copy of the object will be loaded in memory. As well as causing unwanted memory load, it also means that any global data items may have different values in the two different instances of the object, which is a recipe for unexpected side-effects.

We also ban Actions from calling other Actions in the same Business Object as Pages. On the face of it, I can't see any reason for this rule. Aside from making it harder to trace dependencies, is there any reason not to call a published action as a page?

Re: Best Practice for Actions

Anton__Hosang — Thu, 25 Jan 2024 13:30:55 GMT

Calling actions within the same VBO as a page is the way to go. As you said, no second instance is created then, and even BP-authored VBOs have this setup (actions calling pages). e.g. Outlook, Excel etc.

Re: Best Practice for Actions

PvD_SE — Thu, 25 Jan 2024 13:54:33 GMT

Hi Andrew,

The first one seems obvious so that stand.

The second one seems dubious to me. As Anton correctly points out, even the out of the box objects are built that way.
A typical example for is the Attach page that attaches to the application if this is not already the case. We call the Attach page from almost every other page in the same object right after the Start stage.

Happy coding!
Paul
Sweden

Re: Best Practice for Actions

AndrewPascal — Fri, 26 Jan 2024 14:03:58 GMT

Thanks, @AntonHosang1 and @Paul JHM van Doorn. I couldn't see any reason for the rule, but I just wanted to check whether I had missed something!

Have a great weekend.