I have asked this before and not gotten satisfactory answers. When launching a workflow interactively I am struggling with an efficient way to load default values and predefined answers programmatically. How and when those actions get evaluated are a bit of a mystery to me. It seems like it occurs with every key press in a field. I am trying to build a fairly complex form that needs to be dynamic in nature. The default values and valid answers will vary based upon some questions the user answers. The answers the user provides are sent off to an external api and I get back the information I need to populate these values. The form is basically unusable as a storm of actions is invoked anytime I put in a keystroke. Judging buy what I see in the logs it seems like these calls to the actions are actually happening way too many times anyway but if I could somehow at least have them only trigger when the cursor leaves a field or extending the time between keystrokes that the vCO client waits before starting its cycle of executing the field refreshing I could probably work with that.
In the past I have used the web views as a crutch to get around some of this since you need to manually refresh some things when on a single screen and other executions seem to be on hold until you move from screen to screen so with some careful placement of things you can get pretty decent performance. I can't seem to achieve the same effect in the full client. We are trying to avoid the web views at this point since they are eol and the target audience for most of what we do are admin folk. It also makes developing these intelligent forms painfully difficult and I find myself creating another wrapper workflow devoid of any of the smarts so I can quickly execute them for test purposes.
Before anyone suggests that I need to double check my actions and make sure they aren't doing any unnecessary processing trust me they all return immediately if that is an option. Its things like requiring a host name be entered or some other long string. In this case a unique id for lookup that is killing things. There is no real way within the action to know if what is being entered is complete.