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Agents — Concepts and termsMany PRPC functions rely on processes that operate in the background, performing computations and updates on behalf of the applications and their users.
An agent is an internal background process operating on the server on a periodic basis. Agents route assignments according to the rules in your application; they also perform system work such as sending email correspondence and notifications about assignments, generating updated indexes for the full-text search feature, synchronizing caches across nodes in a multiple node system, and so on.
Each system includes these standard agents rules:
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Additional standard agents may be present if you have add-on features or components installed.
You can create additional agents to process requests that are queued for background processing by your application logic.
You cannot add background processing activities to the standard agents; instead, create new agents rules that run your agent activities.
Agents rules (instances of Rule-Agent-Queue) hold lists of agents activity. Only one agents rule can be defined in each RuleSet. After determining which RuleSet your new agent belongs to, determine whether an agents rule is already defined for that RuleSet. If an agents rule exists, add your agent activities to the existing rule. If an agents rule is not yet defined for that RuleSet, create a new agents rule for that RuleSet and add your new agent information to it.
Agents are implemented through two facilities:
- Agents rules — instances of Rule-Agent-Queue. These rules specify the agents defined for one RuleSet, the activity that each agent runs, how it handles the queue, and the interval at which it runs. See About Agents rules
- Agent schedule data objects — instances of Data-Agent-Queue. PRPC generates one agent schedule data node for each node in the system, with information copied from the settings in the associated agents rule. See About Agent Schedule data instances.
An agents rule provides a template that specifies the global settings for that agent on all nodes. To modify the configuration settings for an agent, open the generated agent schedule object for a specific node and modify the settings in the agent schedule.
The Agent Manager is a master agent that gathers and caches the agent configuration information set for your system when PRPC starts. Then, at a regularly scheduled interval, it determines whether any new agents rules were created during the last period. If there are new agents rules, the Agent Manager adds them to its list of agents and generates agent schedule data instances for them for each node. The Agent Manager also notices when updates are made to existing agents rules or agent schedules.
You can use the Agent Management link in the System Management Application to monitor and control agent processing. (For details, see the System Management Application Reference Guide.)
For more information, see 
PDN articles 25042 Overview of Agent Processing and 25051 How to create an agent.
