Actions Concept

The action concept consists in activating an action when a JCR document is added, removed or read. There exist several types of action and it is quite simple to plug your own ones.

By default eXo comes with two supported action types:

Business Process (Bonita & JBPM)

• Content Validation Process
• Content Backup Process

Groovy Scripts

• Transform script: Microsoft Office and PDF documents to text

Actions are there to allow organization manage their content in a very flexible way. Many organizational processes can leverage that functionnality to model and implement use cases.

The sample bundled with the eXo default distribution is an article publication use case:

• An article writer creates the content from its home directory using the ECM explorer portlet and the dialog template. He could also attach some documents like PDF or Word ones (for example by using WebDAV to drop the files).
• After doing all the necessary modifications and versions on the document, he could copy and paste that article into the dedicated publication directory (in our sample it is the /cms/publications directory of the draft workspace). As an "add" action is bound to that directory, the content validation business process will be launched.
• Once one of the content validator will have accepted it and set up some publication dates and backup, then the document will be moved from the draft workspace to the production one. There it can be seen by the Content Browser portlet in the Reference or normal modes.
• When the node is moved to the production workspace (under the /cms/publications directory), a new business process is launched as that location also has an "add" action mapped to it. That action launches the 'back-up" business process which is responsible to move the content from the production workpsace to the backup one when the publication period ends.

Adding an action to a node is a very simple process. By default only the admin-view allows the user to access the "Manage Actions" icon. In the next screenshot you can choose one the the four preconfigured actions, incluing the validation workflow and backup one. Note that each action has its own template (underneath an action is a Node which has an exo:action NodeType). Each template can provide custom variables such as in the case of the send mail action (that one is a script action) the email address to use.