7 Acting
It is possible to define new actions for making external applications
available from a context. These applications need to receive some
parameters that are specific to each object. So, source (resp. well)
modules now produce these parameters, called action arguments,
for each object (resp. for each well). The action arguments of an
object are accessible from the contextual menu of the extent window.
An action argument is made of three parts:
-
mime: a kind of MIME type of the argument (e.g., audio, URL, pattern),
- role: the role played by the argument w.r.t. the object (e.g., file, file list, PDF version),
- value: the value of the argument (e.g., a file name, a URL).
An object can be given any number of parameters, and several
parameters can have the same mime so as to specify different
values for a type of parameters.
New actions can be defined through the command Actions > Add
action.... An action is defined by 3 things:
-
Name of the action: the text that will appear to the user,
- Command to be executed: the command that will be executed if the action is selected,
- The query defining the scope: enables to restrict the objects to which this action can be applied.
Both the name and the command can contain mimes as variables, which
select relevant parameters for the action. For instance a audio player
will use a mime variable audio for instance. A mime can be made
more precise like in audio/mp3. Mimes must be parenthesized and
prefixed by the character '$' for locating and replacing them by
parameter roles in the action name, and parameter values in the action
command.
Every mime variable occuring in the name should also occur in the
command. The mime of an object parameter can be an extension of a
mime variable: e.g., $(audio) matches audio/mp3. An
action can be instantiated several times for a same object if several
roles/values are available for the mime variable. Finally on
Windows/Cygwin, if an action uses a Windows application, then any file
path must be converted. This conversion is simply specified by adding
:win after a mime variable, like in $(image/jpeg:win).
The list of all actions can be displayed by the command Actions >
List actions..., and offers the following commands as buttons:
-
Refresh: refresh the list of actions,
- Add: open a dialog for defining a new action (using the selected action as default values),
- Edit: open a dialog for editing the selected action,
- Delete: delete the selected action,
- Close: close the action list window.
When selecting a set of objects (by default, the full extent), the
contextual menu of the extent window contains all possible
instanciations of actions according to the action arguments of the
selected objects. Selecting an action executes the associated command.
When a same action name applies to several objects, the number of
these objects appears between parentheses. This means the action will
be exexuted many times, and requires confirmation from the user (as
this may be dangerous to launch many times an application). If an
export as a well is possible, actions are also given according to the
action arguments of the would-be well. If such an action is selected,
then the well is produced in a temporary file, and the action command
is executed on this file.