Application and its purpose

Question

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?

csteward · Accepted Answer

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.

mikes0011 · Answer

An object can be referenced in any number of applications / packages, but applications can't refer to each other, so there's no chance of circular references per se.

An application used to have a somewhat more important feature while Tempo was the primary user-facing UI, as certain process models could be published as "actions" that would appear in the general Tempo "actions tab", however this has now been all but deprecated (and i recommend against it in general, other than toying around with it to see what we used to have to deal with).

These days, as Chris said already it's mainly an organizational tool for deployment / sprint / hotfix management (etc). I run O&M (among other things) for my org, and one trick I use is to create a monthly "hotfixes" application right away in Dev at the beginning of each month, with a catch-all "rolling ad-hoc hotfixes" package declared to add things that I need to push into the higher environments but which don't warrant their own JIRA ticket/etc.

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