Clicking on an Action brings up the Action Details panel. The fields displayed on this panel are described below.
The first two non-editable fields show the source and destination components of each action, as well as the types of components being linked. Multiple links can be created between most components if necessary. The next field is the Action Name textbox, which represents the action of the action. This field should be populated with a unique name. You can either enter the name here or double-click the action on the diagram. You can also use the right-click menu and the Rename option to rename the action.
Advanced Options
If the Show Advanced Options button is clicked, more information is made available, depending on the source of the selected link. If the source is a Page or a Partial Page, the following fields will be made available:
The Submission Method dropdown list is for selecting the method of submitting web page content to the server-side. By default with standard pages, the data is passed back with the Form Submit method, in which a standard Form submission is performed. Users can also opt to use the URL Parameters submission method, where the data from the web page is put into a list of parameters, and appended to a URL request string, before being submitted to the server.
If an action targets a third party service there will be an additional AJAX submission method available. This allows a certain part of the page to be replaced asynchronously by the response of the third party service. If an action targets a Partial Page only an AJAX submission method will be available for selection.
Note: The URL Parameters submission method can only be used correctly if the source page of this Action link does not contain any user-editable fields. Also, an Anchor button, with an action type of Target Location, needs to be created on the source page. Please see here for more information.
The Select Page Painter dropdown list shows the View patterns available to the application. A default view pattern with node 'Page_Painter' is created upon project creation, and in most cases this does not need to be changed. However, new View patterns can be generated by clicking on Create New Painter.
If the selected action originates from a Controller, then an Action Condition XPath field is made available (as shown above). This field describes the XPath that determines when data will flow between the action's source and target. This XPath will be saved in the Controller from which this action originates. If the XPath evaluates to true, control flow will then flow along the link, from its source to its target. This is especially useful if multiple targets are specified, with different conditions to be fulfilled per target. For example, a controller may invoke a service to return a list of contacts. The resulting list may contain zero, one or many entries. You may choose to re-direct to different web pages based on the returned results. You would need to set-up three links from the controller to different pages, and each link would have a different XPath to identify the scenario that leads to that web page being rendered. One would identify zero XML entries, one would identify a single entry and a third would identify many.
Note: Once the controller setup has been saved, you may find it easier to edit these condition XPaths using RuleMaker via the View Controller Rules
option against the source controller.
If the target component for an action is a partial page or third party service then the submission method can be AJAX. This enables information to be submitted asynchronously to refresh parts of the page dynamically.