Actions are the mechanism for submitting new records to the database, moving records from one state to another, and modifying or deleting records.
When users click the Actions button on a form or opening the Actions menu on the tool bar, a list of valid actions is displayed, and the default action is highlighted in bold text. You define the default action by using the Default Action tab in the State Properties window. See Default actions. You can also call a default action from a hook.
Only the actions that are available at that moment, based on the user's permissions and the state of the record, are displayed. To avoid potential performance problems, access control hooks do not run when calculating valid actions.
You can define an action to perform these tasks:
You can control which users have access to which actions and when actions can be performed.
A number of predefined action types for commonly used actions are supported, for example, the Submit action and the Change State action. See Supported action types.
In the Designer, each record type has an Actions grid that defines the actions available for records of that type. You can use the Actions grid to add, modify, and delete actions and to create state transitions.
Rational® ClearQuest® software supports the following types of actions:
Setting access control on Base actions affects all actions in the schema. You can modify the access control to actions, including actions that might be added to your schema by applying packages. However, any access control restrictions placed in Base actions apply to all other actions.
The Rational ClearQuest schema developer defines the rules for how users move records between states. State transitions are implemented by actions. To create a state transition, you define an action of the type CHANGE_STATE and then select the source states and a destination state for that action.
You can add action hooks that implement tasks at key points in the life cycle of an active record. For example, by default, all users have access to every action. You can limit the access to an action by using an access-control hook.
Several action hooks are supported: Access Control, Initialization, Validation, Commit, and Notification.
For a description of action hooks and information about how they work with field hooks, see Using hooks to customize your workflow. To learn how to create an access control action hook, see Action access control hook example. Also see Scripting languages and Action access control.
You can define default actions for states. A default action for a state appears in bold on the Actions menu in theRational ClearQuest client.
Default actions are useful for guiding users through the state model. They are required for certain schemas and packages, such as the UCM schema and package. If you use the UCM schema or package, the default actions of your states must provide a valid path through the state type model. For more information, see Adding an IBM Rational UCM integration. Also, default actions can be called from hook code.
Before you can define the default action for a state, you must first create a state transition.
Deleting an action might require other changes to a schema. For example, if you delete a CHANGE_STATE action, you might need to modify the State Transition Matrix to compensate for the lost action. If you have referred to a deleted action in a script, you must modify your script to delete any references to the action.