Hi all.. New to Appian here. I've got a general question regarding applications in Appian. What is the use of an application apart from its ability to group related design objects? Also I'm able to refer rules from a different application in current application. What are the boundaries and best practices of an application? Can there be circular references between applications and What are it's impacts?
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Welcome! An Application is purely a method to group related design objects, to organize development and provide deployment package creation.
Objects can be included in multiple applications, there are no native impacts but it can create concerns with 'loose' deployment practices where say, a developer includes all objects updated this week in a patching package. If shared objects contained in this application are in a different deployment cycle (say, still in testing), they would be erroneously deployed. For this reason, I typically recommend including only objects specific to a certain solution to be included in the application bundle.
But yes, generally these applications are only for design organization.
Thanks for clarifying Chris!