Integrations and extaccess records

Integrations such as SRC, Mobility, RC should call existing processes from the processes they define instead of modifying an existing process.

In the situation where you need to define extaccess records that call display actions in the record’s State there is a good chance that the process will need additional logic to properly function. The best practice for dealing with this situation is to create and call a new process rather than modifying an existing process with integration-specific logic.

For example, an integration wants to perform display action x, which calls Process (p), but needs to put integration specific logic into Process (p) in order to make it perform correctly. The best practice in this case is to:

• Create a new process record which performs the integration specific logic.
• Call the original Process (p) in the “Next Process” tab.
• Add a new action to the State record.
• Call that action from the extaccess record.

This will make the integration easier to maintain and debug.

When you add a new display action to the State record, the $L.action variable will most likely have to be updated. Usually the integration specific process record will need to update $L.action to match the display action being wrapped.

For example, an integration wants to call the “save” display action. A new process record called “integration.record.save” is created, which finishes by calling “record.save” in the next process tab. A new display action called “integration.save” is added to the State record and the extaccess record calls that in its Allowed Actions tab. The “integration.record.save” process record ensures that the $L.action variable is set to “save.”

In some cases, other local variables may need to be set as well. Incident Management, for example, has a $L.mode variable that needs to be managed. Be sure to check both the existing State and Process record when developing a new process for references to variables that may need to be managed.