What is a data page Interaction Boundary?
I saw this old post about "Reload once per interaction" setting on a data page.
https://collaborate.pega.com/question/reload-once-interaction-and-limit-single-data-page
The poster mentioned that the data page will reload once per interaction boundary. I was wondering what that means. Is the boundary a time span or rule context where the data page can be called multiple times without being reloaded?
Pegasystems Inc.
AU
Hi @DanS7319
Think of an interaction as a round trip from the user's browser to a Pega server and back.
For example, when you submit a screen in a process, that submits the data captured in the User Interface to the server and starts a sequence of processing on the server - execute the Post Processing rules for the current Flow Action, complete the assignment, advance the workflow, perhaps create a new assignment and prepare the User Interface to show for it - all before returning to the browser.
All of that is considered part of the one interaction. So a "Reload once per interaction" Data Page referenced once in the Post Processing activity - and again when showing the subsequent User Interface - would be loaded once the first time, but the second time the same results would be re-used.
There are much shorter interactions that meet the definition of a round-trip to the server. Each Action in an Action Set configured on a control is a distinct round-trip and therefore a distinct Interaction.
Even assembling a single User Interface can be orchestrated by several round trips gathering portions of the UI, each of which is a distinct Interaction which - if all dependent on the same Data Page - can cause the same Data Page data to be gathered many times in rapidly short succession, which is a lot of trips to the data source to gather what is probably the same dataset over and over again.
Hi @DanS7319
Think of an interaction as a round trip from the user's browser to a Pega server and back.
For example, when you submit a screen in a process, that submits the data captured in the User Interface to the server and starts a sequence of processing on the server - execute the Post Processing rules for the current Flow Action, complete the assignment, advance the workflow, perhaps create a new assignment and prepare the User Interface to show for it - all before returning to the browser.
All of that is considered part of the one interaction. So a "Reload once per interaction" Data Page referenced once in the Post Processing activity - and again when showing the subsequent User Interface - would be loaded once the first time, but the second time the same results would be re-used.
There are much shorter interactions that meet the definition of a round-trip to the server. Each Action in an Action Set configured on a control is a distinct round-trip and therefore a distinct Interaction.
Even assembling a single User Interface can be orchestrated by several round trips gathering portions of the UI, each of which is a distinct Interaction which - if all dependent on the same Data Page - can cause the same Data Page data to be gathered many times in rapidly short succession, which is a lot of trips to the data source to gather what is probably the same dataset over and over again.
When configuring a Data Page's Load Management, be mindful of how long it would be before a dataset retrieved is likely to become out of date. Often you get an acceptable business outcome using a Thread-scoped data page that expires every 30 seconds, as it takes a lot of load off the server in "chatty" UI's, but still returns up-to-date-enough results.