Demystify of Custom Process Action

During a technical conversation with a colleague of mine, he asked about the actual behavior and uses of this functionality, but I was unable to explain the feature and found it to be the most mysterious and least used by me, so I Decided to reveal the custom process action and share it with everyone. After a long and marathon studies, I succeed to get some knowledge about it.



Microsoft categorize it as Automation feature and named "Action" which is generally known as Custom Process Action or Custom Action.  This component is kept with workflow and it is defined by a XAML window workflow foundation document which is transported as part of a solution, but it can't edit or update by workflow designer.

The Action means a series of commands that can be organized as a business process.


Actions behave like workflows, but there are some features that make it different from workflows.

  • Custom Process Action does not have a trigger. This is usually triggered by a workflow, business process flow, or custom code.
  • Custom Process Actions allow us to define input and output parameters so that we can exchange values with the calling service.
Microsoft provides capabilities to extend the behavior of the Microsoft Dataverse with the help of events (messages). The Event Framework provides the ability to register custom code to run in response to specific events (messages) and custom process actions to create new custom messages (events) that can be called from a web service.

Why do we need this feature?

As per my understanding, this action works as hook which combines workflow and plugin under one message and it can call from anywhere like workflow, business process flow or custom code (workflow extensions or plugins). This means that developers can create a new functionality or chain of commands in a single message to accomplish a domain specific new feature.

An action is a wrapper for multiple service side data operations.

Summary:

Custom process action or action allows to create new message by no/low  code way to declaratively define  synchronous business logic which combines multiple server side events in one wire.

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