Actions

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Actions are human-executable operations that are associated with a context. A list of available actions may appear, for example, in the context menu for a System Tree node.

There is a key difference between context actions and context functions: In contrast to functions, actions may interact with a user by generating some output or requesting data input. Not all actions are interactive, but most involve several steps that require user attention.

Actions interact with the user using UI Procedures. Every action is a combination of UI Procedures and server-side data operations, such as function calls, changing or analyzing variable values, etc. For more information, see the UI Procedures chapter.

Just for contrast, here are some Actions:

•The Data Terminal context has a Configure action that interacts with the user and lets them change the settings for a Data Terminal
•The Alerts context has a Create New Alert action that prompts for the basic settings of a new Alert, creates it (by calling the "Create new alert" function) and then interacts with user again, allowing him to configure the newly created alert.

And here are some Functions:

•The Root context of the LinkServer has a Stop Server ("stop") function that stops the server.
•The Users context has a Delete User Account ("delete") function that removes a given user account.

As you can see, functions are "machine" operations, while actions actually require user intervention and input.

Note that some actions may be also executed in a non-interactive mode. In this case, all user input is pre-defined and all output goes to a server log. Actions can be non-interactive when they're executed by the scheduler or as a result of an alert, for example.

Default Action

Most contexts have a so-called default action. This action is executed when user double-clicks the context in the AggreGate Client System Tree, for example.

Here are two examples for default actions:

•The default action for the Event Filters "Create New Filter".
•The default action for the Query context is "Execute Query", which executes the query clicked on and displays its output to the user.