It is crucial that you name each of your action definitions as clearly as possible so that both you and other site designers will know what the action will do. This will ensure that valid action definitions are selected for each type of Active Display, and your users will understand what the action will do when they execute it.
At the same time, keep in mind that the drop-down that displays the action names will automatically resize to fit the longest title. As a result, CorasWorks recommends that you limit your action names to approximately 30 characters in length.
Actions can be run within or across sites, across site collections, and even across virtual servers, as long as the work is done within the same configuration database. However, actions cannot be written to an action library located in a sub-area within SharePoint Portal Server.
It is important that when you modify an action definition, you do so via the Actions Wizard. An action definition is comprised of more than just its XML definition; there are additional metadata values stored in hidden columns. As a result, a definition should not be modified either manually or programmatically using any means other than the Actions Wizard; CorasWorks does not support any action definitions that are created or modified using any means other than the Actions Wizard.
In order to create and save action definitions, the site designer must have Administrator access to the list where actions are saved. Contributor or Web Designer access is not sufficient. This restriction is due to the fact that the Action Wizard creates the action definitions programmatically and SharePoint requires full permissions to do so.
Active Displays, Cross-Connects, and the Action Selector can all be configured to display an unlimited number of actions from different libraries in the Actions drop-down. However, the drop-down will only display the actions from the libraries to which the user has at least Read access. If the user does not have at least Read access to a particular action library, those actions will not be displayed by the web part.
TIP: If designed properly, you can use this feature to determine the actions you want to provide to a group of users. Different users can have different options based on their security rights in the workplace and the groups in which they members. For example, administrators could have actions available to them to perform administrative work such as archiving. Or, you may want to make certain actions, such as Delete List Item-type actions, available to a select group of individuals.
Users must have a minimum of Contributor access to a destination list in order for an action to succeed in creating, modifying, or deleting items in that list. If a user attempts to execute an action that updates a list to which they do not have at least Contributor access, the action will fail and the defined error message will be displayed.
Actions update records on an item-by-item basis. So if the user attempts to execute an action against multiple items in an Active Display that pulls from multiple lists, the action may succeed with some items and fail with others. If the user has Contributor access to one of the lists that goes into the Active Display and Read access to another list, the items from the list to which the user has read access will fail.
Some action types can copy data from the selected Active Display or Cross-Connect item, some can populate Active Display items with static data from the action definition, and some can prompt the user to populate certain columns when the action is executed. There are a few guidelines to keep in mind regarding the types of column data that can be copied and/or populated.
The following data types can either be copied from a list item in the Active Display or Cross-Connect or populated with static data from the action definition:
• Boolean
• Choice
• Currency
• DateTime
• Multi-Choice
• Note
• Number
• Text
• URL
• User
What that means is, when you create or modify an action definition, depending on the action type, this type of data column can be displayed with both a checkbox (meaning it can be copied from the Active Display or Cross-Connect item) and an entry field (meaning it can be populated with static data from the definition).
The CrossProjectLink data type, on the other hand, can only be copied from a list item in the Active Display or Cross-Connect; it cannot be populated with static data from the action definition and it cannot be entered by the user when the action is executed. As a result, when this type of data column is referenced on the Actions Wizard interface, a checkbox will be available, but an entry field and the Select at Runtime checkbox will not.
The Select at Runtime option, which allows users to populate columns when an action is executed, is available for all other data types except URL.
Calculated fields are not supported. They display a value that is calculated at run-time, so they do not store a value that can be copied or referenced.
When actions were initially introduced, Create List Item and Modify List Item actions did not support document, picture, or form libraries, or any other libraries with a base type of document library. From the Winter 2006 Update moving forward, document libraries (including InfoPath libraries and picture libraries) are supported by all action types.
The Winter 2006 Update and later releases support modification of metadata regarding a document/form/picture. Actions do not modify the document itself. Forms can be copied from one library to another. However, fields that are specified in the XSN (the InfoPath form template) rather than the library cannot be created in the destination; the XSN from the source library is not copied to the destination library
The Action Wizard does not support SPS document libraries, only WSS document libraries. All other list and library types are supported.
In the Winter 2006 Update and later releases, actions support InfoPath forms to the following extent:
• Actions can be used to copy data from an InfoPath form into a list or library.
o The data must be identified in the form template (xsn) as a list field. If the data is not bound to a list field, it cannot be copied.
• Data cannot be copied from a list or library into an InfoPath form.
• Actions can be used to copy data from a remote site collection to the current one (but not vice versa).
While CorasWorks actions do support both lists and libraries as of the Winter 2006 Update, there are some differences in the way each is handled. These differences are described below.
• An action that creates or copies a list item can be executed over and over again, allowing duplicate list items to be created. The same action can only be executed once against a document. If you execute the action a second time against a document, it will see that the document already exists in the destination library and the action will fail. This applies to the following action types:
o Create List Item
o Publisher
• Now that document libraries are supported, an action can be used to copy data from an InfoPath form into a list. For example, you might want to copy the title of an InfoPath form to an Inbox list that has a Title column. However, you cannot copy data from a list into an InfoPath form or other document.