Configuring Actions

This topic is for application designers who want to know how to configure actions.

To configure operations in PhixFlow applications, use actions. Actions convert a screen to a user interface. A user interface enables a user to interact with the data as the business process requires. 

Actions make transactional changes (many individual updates) to data. If you want to make big batch changes to the data, use a task plan to run an analysis model. You can use an action to start a task plan.

To turn a screen into a user interface, you must configure the operations that PhixFlow will run. Usually, these operations will change: 

• either data, for example to update or delete records.
• or the application interface, for example to close one screen and open another.

For example, you can:

1. Design a form with editable fields and buttons.
2. Connect the form to a stream, to populate the fields with data.
3. Make changes to data in the fields.
4. Click the "Save" button.
   At this point there will be no change to the data in the stream until you have configured the button to perform the operation of updating the data in the stream.

To configure an operation using an action:

1. Add an action directly to the repository. Actions that are not associated with a stream can do things like open dashboards. 
2. For specific stream, you can create an action to operate on the stream data. Action on a stream can:
   •  create, update or delete data
   • run a task
   • run analysis on a model
   • open or close a screen/dashboard
   • show prompts or messages to communicate with the user

Actions can:

• make changes to data in a stream. In this case the action is connected to the stream data via one or more micro-action rules.
• make changes unrelated to data, for example to open or close a dashboard.
• run a task plan.

• You can optionally configure

  • the contexts in which the action will or will not run using context parameters
  • a prompt to confirm the user wants to run the action
  • something about uploading a file
  • that PhixFlow checks the conditions to allow the action to run are met (validation)
  • a task plan that will run after the micro-actions
  • any dashboards to open or close when the action completes
  • a message to display after the action completes, for example with errors and warnings

The pages in this topic are:

• Action
• Action Sequence
• Stream Item Actions
• Stream Item Action Attribute
• Stream Item Action Rule
• Context Parameter
• Task Plan Rule
• Drag Types and Drop Targets
• Menu