Internal Notes

This page contains internal implementation notes for contributors and advanced users.

Context Sharing

The inbound/outbound contexts are views into an underlying shared object. Modifications to one affect the other:

• Preprocessing inbound args implicitly transforms them on the underlying context
• If you also expose a preprocessed field on outbound, it will reflect the transformed value

Logging and Debugging

For information about logging configuration, see the Configuration reference:

• Logger configuration: logger
• Log levels: log_level
• Automatic logging: Automatic Logging

execution_context

The execution_context method returns a structured hash for exception reporting and handlers:

{
  inputs: { ... },   # Filtered inbound fields (sensitive values removed)
  outputs: { ... },  # Filtered outbound fields (sensitive values removed)
  # ... any extra keys from set_execution_context or additional_execution_context hook
}

This is automatically passed to the on_exception hook. See Adding Additional Context to Exception Logging for customizing the context.

Private methods for automatic logging:

• inputs_for_logging - Returns only filtered inbound fields (used by pre-execution logs)
• outputs_for_logging - Returns only filtered outbound fields (used by post-execution logs)

These private methods do NOT include additional context from set_execution_context or the hook—they are specifically for automatic logging which only needs to show what the action was called with and what it produced.

#inspect Support

Action instances provide a readable #inspect output that shows:

• The action class name
• Field values (with sensitive values filtered)
• Current execution state