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Introduction

Introduction

You define custom actions within KPI classes. Then:

  • When you display a given KPI in a widget, you can add controls to that widget that invoke the custom actions. See Adding Widget Controls.

  • If you specify a KPI class as the actionClass attribute of the <cube> element, all actions within this class are available to pivot tables that use this cube, which means they can be added as controls to widgets that display these pivot tables.

  • If you specify a KPI class as the actionClass attribute of another <kpi> element, all actions within this class are available to that KPI, in addition to any actions defined within that KPI.

  • You can execute actions from within the Analyzer. Note that in this case, only a subset of the client-side commands are supported: alert, navigate, and newWindow. Other commands are ignored.

For details on defining KPIs, see Advanced Modeling for InterSystems Business Intelligence.

You can perform many of the same operations with either a standard action or a custom action:

Operation Available As Standard Action? Can Be Performed in Custom Action?
Setting a filter Yes Yes
Setting a filter and refreshing the display Yes Yes
Refreshing the display of a widget Yes Yes
Refreshing the display of the entire dashboard Yes No
Specifying the row or column sort for a pivot table Yes No
Specifying the row or column count for a pivot table Yes No
Displaying a listing for a pivot table Yes No
Displaying another dashboard Yes Yes
Displaying a URL in the same page Yes Yes
Displaying a URL in a new page No Yes
Executing code on the server No Yes
Changing the data source of the widget Yes No
Changing the row or column specification of the widget Yes No

For details on the standard actions, see Adding Widget Controls.

Context Information

The system makes context information available to actions, by two different mechanisms. When a user launches a custom action, the system writes context information into the pContext variable, which is available in your custom code on the server. When a custom action opens a URL, the system replaces the $$$VALUELIST and $$$CURRVALUE tokens, if these are included in the URL. The following figure illustrates these mechanisms:

When an action is launched, the pContext variable is set, and the $$$VALUELIST and $$$CURRVALUE tokens are replaced.

Next sectionDefining the Behavior of Actions
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