About Activities
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As a best practice, consider alternatives such as data transforms and linked property references before creating activity rules. These are easier to understand and maintain. For ideas and approaches, see PDN article Nine tactics to reduce your need for custom activities.
Activities automate processing. Activities contain a sequence of structured steps. Each step calls a method rule or contains a control instruction such as Call or Branch. Each activity has a type that characterizes its purpose and affects which other rules can call it.
The Steps tab contains the logic of the activity. These topics describe this tab:
When a requestor session runs an activity for the first time, the system converts information from the activity into Java, compiles the Java, and executes it. Later executions (of the same activity in the same RuleSet, version, and so on) reuse the compiled Java.
After you complete and save the Activity rule form, you can test it interactively with the Run toolbar action. See How to unit test an activity with the Run Rule feature .
If your operator ID has the AutomatedTesting privilege through an access role, you can record and save test cases as you unit test the activity. See Working with the Test Cases tab.
Don't use an activity for calculations or property validations that you can implement as constraints rules or Declare Expression rules. Use of a declarative rule (rather than an activity) eliminates the need to control how and when an activity executes. The Pegasystems Implementation Methodology approach promotes declarative processing rather than activities when feasible.
Use the Application Explorer to access activities that apply to the work types in your application. Use the Records Explorer to list all activities available to you.
Activities are part of the Technical category. They are instances of the Rule-Obj-Activity class.
Technical category
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