[development] Help fix Actions API - test the patch!

[Jeff Eaton]

Actions are a way of abstracting discrete, granular tasks like  
publishing or unpublishing a node, bookmarking a url, sending a  
node's url to an administrator, adding points to a user's UserPoints  
account, changing the author of a node, adding roles to a user, and  
so on.

One application of these granular actions is mapping them to hooks.  
(IE, whenver a node is published, do <x>.) But Actions are useful ANY  
TIME you want to display a list of domain-specific tasks for the user  
to choose from. Views-Actions, for example, lets you add a button to  
any list or table view that initiates a given action. That allows  
admins to build a no-code-required roll-your-own-content-management- 
dashboard using a filtered view.

Quite a few places in core can benefit as well -- the node and user  
admin screens, where we show a full list of users and a list of  
recent content, currently implement their own custom APIs for adding  
items to the 'what should I do with the things you selected'  
dropdowns. Instead, we should simply list all <node actions> or all  
<user actions> in those lists. That makes it dirt simple to add new  
items, and for other portions of the system to reuse the code that  
drives THAT admin panel.

flagged-content is an excellent example module, as well. It lets  
users flag content as offensive, but it requires its own UI and its  
own code for handling 'what happens after a node gets flagged.' By  
leveraging actions, it could simply display a list of <node actions>  
and fire off whatever ones the admin has set up.

Actions.module -- the one in core that maps hook_user, hook_nodeapi,  
hook_comment, and hook_cron operations to arbitrary actions -- is one  
of many applications of the Actions API.

--Jeff

On Jul 20, 2007, at 7:56 AM, fago wrote:

>
>> Webchick and I have built a patch that fixes this, moving the truly
>> core actions API functions into the .inc file, moving one setup
>> screen into system.module, and keeping the advanced hook-to-action
>> mapping UI in the optional actions.module. The patch also fixes a
>> number of schema related issues and code style problems that chx has
>> pointed out in the past.
>
> If modules can't assign actions to hooks, what are modules supposed to
> do with the actions API? Retrieve configured actions and fire them
> theirself?
>
> Sry for the probably dumb question, but I'd like to get this right.
>
> thanks,
> fago
>