More about Activity rules

Activity Types

Most activities referenced in a flow are defined in the Work- base class, or a class derived from the Work- base class. To become a Notify, Integrator, Utility, Routing, or Assignment activity, they must meet other constraints and have this type recorded in the Activity Type field of the Security tab.

Verbalization display

Click the Preview button in the toolbar () or type the equivalent keyboard shortcut CTRL+ALT+P to see a step-by-step verbalization or English text description of this activity (informally known as the "Describe This Rule" presentation). The system creates an HTML topic describing each step of the activity, with links to other rules referenced by the step.

Processing and presentation of failed activities and uncaught exceptions

When a top-level activity completes but produces no HTML display, by default a "No content" form appears with a green checkmark:

When an activity fails or encounters an uncaught exception, by default a "Please contact your system administrator" window appears with a red X mark:

Your application can override and localize standard harness rules that present these two windows, and can override the standard activities that call the harness rules. See See How to customize the activity success and exception windows.

Calling an activity within an expression

The standard function callActivity() in the Pega-RULES Utilities library calls an activity, but returns only void, not a value result. You can execute an activity in an expression, but only for its side effects. Identify the primary page, the activity, and the parameter page. For example:

@Pega-RULES:Utilities.callActivity(pyWorkPage,
      MyActivity, tools.getParameterPage());

Java code display

When you save an activity rule, the system converts the steps to Java source code. As a learning or debugging aid, you can review this Java code.

Click the Show Java toolbar button () to see the system-generated Java code that implements the activity. The window presents a read-only preview of the Java that implements this rule instance. This Java code is not identical to the Java that is executed at runtime, which includes Java code inlined from other rule instances and reflects rules in the requestor's RuleSet list.

	instruction, method, step, task
	Activity-List-Add method Branching to another activity Calling another activity Debugging with the Tracer Finding methods by function How to create activities for use in flows How to test method results using a transition Using Java in an activity step
	Atlas — Standard methods by name

About Activity rules