Actions can be seen as a special flavor of expression types that you can use to define the interactive part of BRFplus. Under certain conditions, actions can be used as an alternative to expressions. For example, in a decision table you can define that for a condition row, the system shall perform an action rather than returning a result value. Here is a list of possible usages for actions:

However, actions do not have any output. As a consequence, you can only use them as an element for the final step in each processing branch. Here, an action can be used to respond to the results of the rule calculation so far. But there is no way of, and no sense in, performing any rule calculations as a response to an action that has been previously triggered.

Depending on the action type, it is still possible to use an action as the trigger for system activities of considerable complexity. This is true, for example, for action types Workflow or Call Procedure. But still, once an action has been carried out, it is not possible to define any further processing as a specific response to any kind of changes that may have been made by that action.

Some of the action types correspond to a related expression type. To avoid confusion whether a given object is an action or an expression, the action type names are all marked by a trailing (Act) in the system. In addition, the action type names follow the linguistic pattern 'verb — object' (for example, as in Call Procedure (Act), as opposed to the Procedure Call expression type), where possible.

BRFplus supports the following action types: