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 roll-up, 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.
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.
Action-enabled-roll-ups, Cross-Connects, and the Action Picker 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 a roll-up 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 roll-up 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 roll-up or Cross-Connect item, some can populate roll-up 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 roll-up 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 roll-up 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 roll-up 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.
This section describes some of the portability issues surrounding action definitions.
For all of these action types, the Configure Action section of the Actions Wizard includes a field where the URL of the destination list is identified.
· You can enter
a URL to a site that differs from the site where the Actions Wizard is located,
but is still in the same content database. If you do this, a relative reference
to the identified list is stored.
For example:
The Actions Wizard
is running on a page at http://mysite/sites/jdoe. You select a list
from a site on http://mysite. The reference is
stored as /sites/xyzsite/Lists/mylist. If the action definition is placed on a
new site, the only requirement is that there is a list at
/sites/xyzsite/Lists/mylist. The server name does not matter.
· You can enter
a URL to a different top-level site than the one where the Actions Wizard is
located. If you do this, an absolute reference is stored to the identified site
and destination list. This makes the reference non-portable if the
definition is placed on a server that is not in the same database as the
reference.
For example:
The Actions Wizard is running on a page at
http://mysite/sites/jdoe. You select a
destination list from a site on http://yoursite/sites/you. The reference is
stored as http://yoursite/sites/you/Lists/mylist.
If it did not work this way, the framework would never know to get the list from
a site other than the one the user is on when executing the action. This is not
as portable as the above example.
When creating a Create List Item action definition or Create Item Link action definition, you also have the option to select literal (static) values from choice fields and multi-choice fields. If you do this and the selected value does not exist in the Choices collection for that field in the selected roll-up or Cross-Connect item, the action will fail.
This type of action is not tied to a specific list. The list you identify in the action definition is only used for schema column matching. As long as the list item in the roll-up contains the column(s) identified in the action definition, the action will run.
For example, say you create an action and select a list that has a Title column. You type My New Title in the Title field when defining the action and leave all of the other available columns blank. This action can be run on any list item that has a Title field. If you also entered a value in the Description column, the action could only be executed against list items that contain both a Title and Description column.
There are no portability issues for this type of action.
Portability issues may arise if a literal email server is identified in the action definition and is then unreachable when the action is ported to new domain. Issues may also arise if Use SharePoint for Email is selected and email is not configured on the new SharePoint site.
This type of action is not portable. The Summer 06 release does not support relative URLs for navigation.
When actions were initially deployed in the Winter 2006 release, if you deployed an action that was configured to use a list that did not exist in the current configuration, you would have to re-select the appropriate list in the Actions Wizard and then re-enter all of the values for the action definition.
In the Winter 2006 Update and later releases, if you deploy an action that is configured to use a list that does not exist in the current configuration, you still have to re-select the appropriate list, but all of the definition values are automatically populated after selecting the list.
If you want to be able to reuse an action definition in another area of the same workplace environment, you will need to reconfigure the action to use an absolute URL. The reason is that you will be moving the action definition. When you do this, if it is configured with an absolute URL, when you want to reference it in the new site, it will be immediately reusable without any additional configuration.
You will need to modify the actions in the original source actions library to be an absolute URL reference. Note, however, when working with actions, this configuration will only stay permanent if the display is configured to work with an action library that is not in the same site as the display. Therefore, in certain circumstances, you will have to move either the display to another site first or move the action library to another site and then configure it.
When you select an action to enable for a particular roll-up or Cross-Connect, the roll-up/Cross-Connect web part stores a reference to the location of the action definition. If the action definition is located in a library in the same site where the roll-up or Cross-Connect is located, a reference is stored with just the library name. If the action definition is located in a different site, a reference is stored with the entire path.
If you enable actions for a roll-up or Cross-Connect and then save the site as a site template, the references to action definitions that are stored in action libraries in the same site are maintained and are portable. Any references that include the entire path are not portable.
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.