McUserII’s shown how to do it.
If you want the technical explanation for what you were seeing, you were concatenating records to records:
-- When a record is concatenated to empty braces, the braces are taken to represent an empty record and the result too is a record.
set recordList to {}
set actionRecord to {actionID:"1", actionDescription:"Description", actionStarted:"15/09/1980", actionFinished:"15/09/2000", ownerEmail:"foo@bar.com"}
set recordList to recordList & actionRecord
--> {actionID:"1", actionDescription:"Description", actionStarted:"15/09/1980", actionFinished:"15/09/2000", ownerEmail:"foo@bar.com"}
-- When two records are concatenated, the result contains the properties from both records. Where the same properties occurs in both records, their values in the result are those from the first (left) record.
set actionRecord to {actionID:"2", actionDescription:"Description2", actionStarted:"15/09/1980", actionFinished:"15/09/2000", ownerEmail:"foo@bar.com"}
set recordList to recordList & actionRecord
--> {actionID:"1", actionDescription:"Description", actionStarted:"15/09/1980", actionFinished:"15/09/2000", ownerEmail:"foo@bar.com"}
If for some reason you have to build a list of records by concatenation, the records must be presented in their own lists, so that you’re concatenating lists to lists:
-- When a list is concatentated to empty braces, they braces are taken to represent an empty list and the result too is a list.
set recordList to {}
set actionRecord to {actionID:"1", actionDescription:"Description", actionStarted:"15/09/1980", actionFinished:"15/09/2000", ownerEmail:"foo@bar.com"}
set recordList to recordList & {actionRecord} -- NB. actionRecord in a list.
--> {{actionID:"1", actionDescription:"Description", actionStarted:"15/09/1980", actionFinished:"15/09/2000", ownerEmail:"foo@bar.com"}}
-- When two lists are concatenated, the result contains the items from both lists.
set actionRecord to {actionID:"2", actionDescription:"Description2", actionStarted:"15/09/1980", actionFinished:"15/09/2000", ownerEmail:"foo@bar.com"}
set recordList to recordList & {actionRecord} -- Ditto.
--> {{actionID:"1", actionDescription:"Description", actionStarted:"15/09/1980", actionFinished:"15/09/2000", ownerEmail:"foo@bar.com"}, {actionID:"2", actionDescription:"Description2", actionStarted:"15/09/1980", actionFinished:"15/09/2000", ownerEmail:"foo@bar.com"}}
But the ‘set end of list’ method McUsrII’s given is better, being more efficient and less confusing!