posted on Friday, November 16, 2007 1:51 PM
by
BayerWhite
When To Use The Policy Activity
Last Saturday while speaking in Orlando, Fl., I was asked about building data objects (entities) within a Policy activity. The person I was talking with wanted to build an object and all of it's properties within a Policy activity, based on certain rules so it could be saved in the database. Even though it is something that could be done, I think there are better places to do this type of operation, while keeping the policy activity for actual policies.
Wikipedia's definition of a policy is "A deliberate plan of action to guide decisions and achieve rational outcome(s)."
This also applies to the policy activity... Quite simply, the policy activity defines rules or ruleset, used to decide actions. A good example for using a Policy activity is maybe setting rules for validating when an object is ready to be sent to the database. One could propose the case that objects could be built based on rules using the actions within a ruleset, however there might be additional validation that needs to be done to accomplish this type of behavior. Instead, this operation of building data objects so they can be sent to the database could easily be placed within an access layer which another activity within the workflow could call.