Designing the Procedure Logic › Advanced Action Diagram Features › Exit States

Exit States

Exit State is a special attribute whose value controls what happens at the conclusion of a procedure step.

Depending on the value of Exit State, the procedure step may react in the following way:

• Display a message in the system message field.
• Initiate a dialog flow.
• Roll back database updates resulting from the execution of the procedure step.
• Abort the procedure step. Roll back all database updates and abnormally terminate.

The special attribute Exit State is assigned a value using the exit state is action. The only exit state values that can be assigned are those defined using the Exit State definition facility.

Exit state definitions can be built using System Defaults or from any tool that can reference Exit States.

Each Exit State definition includes the following components:

• Name—The name appears as the subject of the EXIT STATE IS action.

  For example, an Exit State customer NOT FOUND may be set if a particular CUSTOMER does not exist on the database. In that case, the EXIT STATE IS action in the action diagram would read:

  EXIT STATE IS CUSTOMER_NOT_FOUND
  

• Message—The message appears in the system message field if its associated exit state value is set when the procedure step concludes and the exit state value does not trigger a dialog flow or an abnormal termination.

  Messages are displayed according to the message type. The message types are Informational, Warning and Error.

  In online procedure steps, each type of message is displayed on the screen with different video properties.

  For example, the CUSTOMER_NOT_FOUND Exit State may have an associated message: Requested customer not on the database. If CUSTOMER_NOT_FOUND is set in the WHEN NOT FOUND condition of a READ statement, the message requested customer not on the database appears in the system message field of a screen.

• Termination Action—The termination action indicates the type of processing that is performed at run time when the associated exit state value is detected. The possible termination actions are described in the following table.

More information:

Designing the Procedure Dialog