What is Action Builder? Action Builder is a new feature coming in the next version of LiveCycle Designer, the LiveCycle form design tool. Action Builder is a tool for building interactivity into dynamic forms that doesn’t require you to write script.
Building interactive forms is nothing new, but it wasn’t an easy task. Most common forms of interactivity required that you write script either in FormCalc or JavaScript. Action Builder writes and maintains this script for you.
Let’s take a look at the UI.
On the left side is a list of all the Actions defined in your form, and on the right is a list of the Conditions and Results that make up the selected Action. Each Action can have multiple conditions (which can be combined in various ways – more on this in a future post), and can have multiple results.
A new condition row starts out asking you to choose an object that the condition will be based on:
Most objects have conditions available. Once you choose one, you’re given the conditions available for that object:
I picked a button, which only has one condition (“is clicked”) so there aren’t any options to choose. The conditions for this Action will be met when the button is clicked, and when the conditions are met, all of the results defined for the Action execute, in the order they are listed.
When you create a new Result row, you’re prompted to choose the type of result you want this row to be:
I’ll choose “Go to a Web Page”, and the row changes into the parameters for that result:
The completed Action is given the automatically generated name “Button1.click”, which you can rename. This new action will launch a web page when I click a button on my form.
Not exactly rocket science, but even this simple activity required writing script in earlier versions of Designer.
Action Builder is designed to be flexible enough that even if we didn’t specifically think of something you might want to do with it, there’s still a pretty good chance it’s possible. We’re looking forward to seeing what you build with it – and what you wish you could build with it, so we can extend it in future versions.