Activities are made up of Actions. Actions are the smallest unit of work in a workflow. Don't let their size fool you though. Like ants, they may be small, but they can move large objects by working together. Some examples of what actions can do are:

• Send an email.
• Set the value of an attribute.
• Present the person with a form to enter data.
• Run a SQL query.
• Activate a new activity.

Configure Actions

While each action type will have configuration settings unique to its purpose, all actions do share some similar configuration settings. Let's look at these common settings. They can be found by clicking on an activity in a workflow configuration.

1. Name - The name is used to help describe the task the action is performing within the activity.
2. Action Is Completed On Success - This tells the workflow engine if the action should be marked as completed when it runs successfully. For most actions you'll want to be sure this is set to 'True'. But there may be times when you want an action to be performed every time the workflow is processed.
3. Activity Is Completed On Success - This setting tells the workflow engine to mark the entire activity as complete if the action successfully runs. This has the effect of keeping all following actions from running. If you are familiar with programming logic, this is similar to a break statement.
4. Action Type - This is where you configure what type of action you want to perform. There are many different types of actions, each with their own function. We have each type of action documented for you in the Workflow Actions Documentation.
5. Assign Message - The message that is displayed based on the Action Type selected.
6. Person Picker - The person picker is here because of the selected action type. Different fields will appear in this area depending on the type of action that's been chosen.

Use Action Filters

We learned about ways we can control the flow of actions inside an activity in the previous section. Action Filters provide us with another powerful way of controlling the flow logic of a workflow. They allow you to only run an action if the value of an attribute meets a criterion you define.

When an action has a filter configured, the filter icon will display in yellow to help you know that a filter is present.

Although most of the filter match criteria are self-explanatory, the Regular Expression is possibly unfamiliar to you. Simply put, a regular expression is a sequence of characters that define a search pattern and using them you can achieve powerful text matching. For example, if you wanted to match a prayer request text for the phrases "suicide", "SUICIDE", "kill himself", "kill herself", or "kill myself" you could use a regular expression value of (?i)(suicide|kill (h|m)(\S+)(\s*)self). You can find a Microsoft Regular Expression Quick Reference online and use a tool like https://www.debuggex.com/ for testing your new creations.

Sometimes, a workflow action might not be able to finish its job. This could happen because the "Run If" conditions needed to run the action aren't met. To help your workflow run smoother in this case, you may consider enabling the Complete Action If Criteria Unmet option. When you turn this on for a specific action, Rock will automatically mark the action as "Completed" even if the conditions aren't met. This way, you won't have to worry about unfinished business.

Note, when an action is completed this way, Rock will keep a record of it in the workflow log. The log will show that the action couldn't be finished but was marked as complete.

Default Action Types

For a listing of Rock's workflow actions, see the Workflow Actions Documentation. There we outline a number of actions that come with Rock, providing tips on when and how to use them. Screenshots of the settings are also provided.