Action designer
Learn how to design actions for your custom integrations.
Actioner lets you create and update your own actions for your custom integrations.
To create a new action, navigate to Actions tab in your integration and click + button. Once you create a new action, your action opens in design mode.
Design mode
Design mode is the interface that lets you access and update your action's components. You can design and test your actions by navigating between Inputs, Requests, Functions and Responses of your action on the same screen.
In design mode, your progress on your actions is automatically saved as a draft as you update any component. When your action is ready to be run, you can apply your changes, or revert them and save the action without your progress and delete your draft.
Integrations and integration components
Integrations
To design your own actions, you first need to create an integration. An integration is a container for your actions and triggers that run in the same tool.
Connections
For an action to send an API request to your tool, it has to be authorized to interact with it. This authorization is referred as a connection. Before starting designing your own actions, it is recommended that you add a new connection schema.
Triggers
Triggers are the events happening in your tool.
Actions
Actions are the atomic units of work you do in your everyday applications. Actions you can design in Actioner range from listing your customer activities to updating your deals, from streamlining your incident management process to answering your customer questions.
An action takes inputs, executes requests and functions and produces responses. In this section, we'll take a closer look to each component and how they relate to each other.
Action components
Inputs
Inputs are the components used for gathering info from users to run the action. They can be text fields, select components, checkboxes, radio buttons or date-time pickers. You can think of a form that users fill out to create an issue or the filters they select from to search issues.
Requests
API requests are the HTTP calls sent to the REST APIs of your tools and the retrieved responses from them. They are used in two ways.
- They can be sent to perform an action in your tool.
- Their responses can be dynamic sources for your input components.
An API request is typically associated with a connection. When a request is associated with a connection, URL and authentication credentials of the connection are automatically applied to the API request when it is sent. This means that you do not have to configure the same URLs or credentials each time adding a new API request.
Functions
A function in action designer is a building block written in JavaScript. It is a set of statements that performs a task or calculates a value. Functions let you write larger, reusable, blocks of code and enable you to extend the capabilities of your actions.
Once created, functions are scoped to the action. By adding a function, you can manipulate and transform any data generated inside that action. If you find yourself using the same or similar blocks of code multiple times throughout your action, it might be worth pulling that out into a function.
More than the ability to write longer JavaScript code, functions also enable you to output values in key value pairs and call them whenever they are needed to generate requests or the response of your action.