RE: Difference between Adding objects and just referencing it

dant0005 — Wed, 07 Sep 2022 15:26:01 GMT

Mike,

thank you a lot for this great answer.

This helped!

Dan

RE: Difference between Adding objects and just referencing it

Mike Schmitt — Wed, 07 Sep 2022 14:23:36 GMT

It depends a lot on the preferences / standards set by and used by your dev team, and your desired application hierarchy and desired level of independence.

By default, your original assumption is generally considered correct - if you use a common object from app ZZZ in app AAA, you would just let the ZZZ object sit in app ZZZ. Generally speaking you would need to make sure that ZZZ objects are updated and deployed across your target environments before use (or at least before AAA gets deployed) - consider the use cases where ZZZ isn't actually promoted to PROD yet, or perhaps the particular rule or object you reference from ZZZ is either newer or newly updated. These are easy situations to handle, of course, but need to be kept under consideration.

Sometimes in my personal development, while working on a ticket, I have reason to add shared objects that are perhaps under the scope of a higher-level app in the hierarchy. I tend to develop in app packages that are ticket-specific much of the time, and in these cases I'll add or update higher-level objects directly into the ticket application (often simultaneously adding them to their "main" application as well, if needed). The difference of course is that these applications are transient in nature and in the end, it'll matter less that there are cross-app objects.

Generally speaking and from a purely high-level technical standpoint, of course, it doesn't really matter how many apps a single object is in - they're all treated the same. So from that standpoint it doesn't matter as much whether objects are added to apps or not - the difference is down to how you need to keep things organized for your own purposes.