About Activities

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 the 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:

• Steps tab — Entering when preconditions 
• Steps tab — Entering loops 
• Steps tab — Entering method parameters 
• Steps tab — Entering transitions 

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.

Access

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.

Category

Activities are part of the Technical category. They are instances of the Rule-Obj-Activity class.

	implementation methodology
	How to create activities for use in flows How to unit test an activity
	Standard activities — Extension points Standard activities for flows Standard activities — Process Engine API Standard activities of type Activity

Technical category

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