An action is a piece of work attached to a transition and run whenever that transition is applied — from a menu in the web frontend, from an AWP portal or from a scheduler job alike. The actions of a transition run in the configured order.
An action either succeeds or fails with a message. A failure aborts the whole step: the item keeps its state and everything the actions wrote up to that point is discarded, so an item is never left half-processed. The message is reported to whoever applied the transition, and the Workflow Automation job items it as the failure reason.
A transition that carries actions is still offered in the menus — whether an action succeeds can only be known by running it. That is the point: a required-fields check is much more useful as “these three fields are still empty” than as a step that is silently missing.
Succeeds when the item matches the configured query, fails otherwise. With no query configured the check always succeeds.
| Configuration | |
|---|---|
| Query | The Fylr query the item must match. |
Use it as a guard on an automated state — the same check on a transition's Only Items Matching restriction would hide the transition instead of reporting why it did not run.
Verifies that all configured fields of the item have a value before it is allowed to move on. The failure message names the empty fields by their display name. With no fields configured the check always succeeds.
| Configuration | |
|---|---|
| Field | The fields that must be filled. Add… offers the text, date, boolean, asset and linked-object fields of the workflow's target table, Remove deletes the selected rows. |
A field counts as filled as soon as it holds any value, whatever its type.
Writes a Metadata Template into the item, so a transition can stamp field values along with the state change.
| Configuration | |
|---|---|
| Metadata Template | The template to apply. Only templates that carry entries for the workflow's target table are offered, because a template without matching entries would do nothing. |
The action fails if the configured template no longer exists when the transition is applied.
AWE defines a public FylrJavaClasses API that can be implemented by any Java developer to extend the available actions. Actions are installed as plugins with ACC's plugin manager and then appear in the Add Action chooser on the transition's Actions tab and in the Workflow Automation job.
A transition that names an action which is not installed on the server is reported by Validate Workflow…, and the scheduler jobs skip such a workflow rather than failing on every item.