Overview

What is an action?

An action is the smallest unit of instruction in a workflow. System actions are included with Mistral or downloaded to the NSP, and ad-hoc actions are customized by the user.

Actions can be installed using Artifacts; see How do I install an artifact bundle?.

For example, std.http is a system action: it sends an HTTP request. If this action is incorporated into a workflow, the user must specify the URL as part of executing the workflow. An ad-hoc action can be created that sends an HTTP request to a specific URL. A workflow that incorporated this ad-hoc action would not require the URL as part of the user input.

The Actions page shows the actions saved to NSP. Both system actions and ad-hoc actions are listed. You can create, edit, or delete an ad-hoc action. System actions are read-only.

Double-click on an action to open an Action Detail page, which provides a description of the action including parameters and usage examples.

What is an action execution?

An action execution is a record of an executed action. The Action Executions view shows the list of actions that were executed by workflows, the names of the tasks that initiated them, and their status.

Choose Action Executions from the drop-down list at the top left of the page to open the Action Executions view.

What can I do with actions or action executions?

Viewing the lists of actions and action executions can be useful to developers for troubleshooting and evaluating whether and how workflows might need to be modified.

Double-click on an action on the Actions page to open an Action Detail page. The Action Details page provides documentation about the action, including a description, identifying details, and, the YAML definition of the action.

See the Workflows tutorial on the Network Developer Portal for more information.

To evaluate a YAQL expression, click to open the Yaqulator.