Public Methods

Subclasses may override this method, but it's not very common. It is called when you invoke a method in your Workflow object that returns an Action object, for example, methods such as $wf->get_action will call this method.

Your action classes usually subclass directly from Workflow::Action and they don't need to override this method at all. However, under some circumstances, you may find the need to extend your action classes.

init()

Suppose you want to define some extra properties to actions but you also want for some of these properties to depend on a particular state. For example, the action "icon" will almost allways be the same, but the action "index" will depend on state, so you can display your actions in a certain order according to that particular state. Here is an example on how you easily do this by overriding new():

1) Set the less changing properties in your action definition:

  <actions>
    <type>foo</type>
    <action name="Browse"
      type="menu_button" icon="list_icon"
      class="actual::action::class">
    </action>

2) Set the state dependant properties in the state definition:

 <state name="INITIAL">
   <description>
     Manage Manufaturers
   </description>
   <action index="0" name="Browse" resulting_state="BROWSE">
     <condition name="roleis_oem_mgmt"/>
   </action>
   <action index="1" name="Create" resulting_state="CREATE">
     <condition name="roleis_oem_mgmt"/>
   </action>
   <action index="2" name="Back" resulting_state="CLOSED"/>
 </state>

3) Craft a custom action base class

  package your::action::base::class;

  use warnings;
  use strict;

  use base qw( Workflow::Action );
  use Workflow::Exception qw( workflow_error );

  # extra action class properties
  my @EXTRA_PROPS = qw( index icon type data );
  __PACKAGE__->mk_accessors(@EXTRA_PROPS);

  sub init {
    my ($self, $wf, $params) = @_;
    $self->SUPER::init($wf, $params);
    # set only our extra properties from action class def
    foreach my $prop (@EXTRA_PROPS) {
      next if ( $self->$prop );
      $self->$prop( $params->{$prop} );
    }
    # override specific extra action properties according to state
    my $wf_state = $wf->_get_workflow_state;
    my $action = $wf_state->{_actions}->{$self->name};
    $self->index($action->{index});
  }


  1;

4) Use your custom action base class instead of the default

  package actual::action::class;

  use warnings;
  use strict;

  use base qw( your::base::action::class );
  use Workflow::Exception qw( workflow_error );

  sub execute {
    ...
  }

  1;

required_fields()

Return a list of Workflow::Action::InputField objects that are required.

optional_fields()

Return a list of Workflow::Action::InputField objects that are optional.

fields()

Return a list of all Workflow::Action::InputField objects associated with this action.

Private Methods

init is called in conjuction with the overall workflow initialization.

It sets up the necessary validators based on the on configured actions, input fields and required fields.

add_field( @fields )

Add one or more Workflow::Action::InputFields to the action.

add_validators( @validator_config )

Given the 'validator' configuration declarations in the action configuration, ask the Workflow::Factory for the Workflow::Validator object associated with each name and store that along with the arguments to be used, runtime and otherwise.

get_validators()

Get a list of all the validator hashrefs, each with two keys: 'validator' and 'args'. The 'validator' key contains the appropriate Workflow::Validator object, while 'args' contains an arrayref of arguments to pass to the validator, some of which may need to be evaluated at runtime.

validate( $workflow )

Run through all validators for this action. If any fail they will throw a Workflow::Exception, the validation subclass.

execute( $workflow )

Subclasses must implement -- this will perform the actual work. It's not required that you return anything, but if the action may be used in a Workflow::State object that has multiple resulting states you should return a simple scalar for a return value.

add_fields

Method to add fields to the workflow. The method takes an array of fields.