The priority field on the Admin tab of Actions allows to precisely control in which order Actions are executed within the same Runtypes.
Note that every Action has a recommended range indicated in front of the priority input field. If you really know what you are doing, values outside of the recommended range can be used.
By default, an Action will have the priority in the exact middle of the recommended range.
Saving an Action with a priority outside of the recommended range will generate a warning message - note that this is not a validation message (which would keep you from saving the document), but only making you aware that an Action does not match the recommended defaults.
Within each Runtype, order of execution is determined by
- Dependencies
- References
- Priority
- Title of Action (alphabetically)
In other words: Actions with the same priority are executed by title alphabetically (unless brought forward within the same Runtype through references or dependencies).
Every type of Action has a default priority, e.g. Connections come before Locations come before Workspace pages come before Desktop Icons.
(That is because before you can fill in Location document details, a Connection document might be needed, or before adding a desktop icon to the workspace you might need a workspace page first).
Occasionally you may need to choose for a priority different from the default.
Example 1:
Ensuring that 5 desktop icon Actions are executed in a particular order to have them positioned next to each other,
In this example, desktop icon Actions should run in the correct order 1, 2, 3, 4.
Example 2:
Creating a location document only if a desktop icon action already created/detected an existing local replica.
In this example, the desktop icon Action must run before the location document management Action.
NOTE that it is advisable to not use priorities with increments of 1 but rather 100 or 1,000 - e.g.
Action 1 gets priority 1,000 and Action 2 gets priority 2,000.
This way you can easily insert Actions later on by using a priority like 1,500 or similar.