Automation Agents

The service have a major important capability of running automated agents to perform business procedures on business objects, or perform various other tasks. The automated agent capability is a pseudo-application specific language that allows complete configurable functionality based on the needs of the client’s business practices. These agents and the associated logic are automatically run on the application when configured to do so and are triggered via application generated lifetime events that are raised based on various actions that took place within the service. Consult Online Help for more details about automation agents and the specific options available for the different business entities that exist within the service. By default, these automation agent capabilities can be configured by any users that have the DEFAULT and ADMIN ACLs. However, agent activity can have a significant impact on performance and all agent creation/modification should be handled by a formal change control process.

Agent Run As

By default, agent actions run as the Admin user for the domain of the business object. There is a capability of having the agent and its associated business object procedures and tasks run as a different user or a different user role than the user related to the business event that triggered the agent to run. The different user or different user role should be related to the business object itself.

In order to change this configuration, an administrator would first need to check the value on the automation agent itself on the main tab there is a Run As Type dropdown list field, as well as fields for either the user or user role to use when the agent runs.

Direct SQL Update

Within an automation agent, there is a capability of being able to configure any number of business actions that will directly perform any SQL statement.

The service have no capability of being able to audit the data changes that are performed by this direct SQL. There can be logging enabled but this should not be used as an audit feature due to the significant performance impact.

The Direct SQL Update agent action, although powerful, can have a significant impact on performance.