Available Actions

Advanced Workflows provide an incredibly easy-to-use, intuitive interface for developing automation applications. The basic building blocks are called actions, which are plain-English, drag-and-drop, fill-in-the-blank dialog boxes that you can use to build Advanced Workflows tasks. Actions enable the development of sophisticated automation processes, and eliminate the need for code. You could think of them as the steps that do the actual work of a task. You can drag and drop actions in the Task Builder to build a series of Advanced Workflows steps that collectively make up the task. You can view all available actions in the Task Builder's Available Actions pane, categorized into folders. You build a task by dragging actions from the Available Actions pane into the Steps pane of the Task Builder. Pre-built actions include starting applications, sending keystrokes, clicking controls, uploading files, and much more. These actions can be further expanded by the use of variables, constants, and expressions.

Advanced Workflows actions are organized in groups (or categories) to facilitate the development process:

Action Group

Description

Active Directory

Allows automation of common Active Directory operations.

Array

Use Array actions to create, resize, or set the values of one or more elements in an array.

Amazon DynamoDB

Use Amazon DynamoDB actions to manage your DynamoDB

Amazon EC2

Use Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) actions to manage your EC2 session and Elastic Block Store (EBS).

Amazon RDS

Use Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) actions to create and manage RDS instances.

Amazon S3

Use Amazon S3 actions to create and manage S3 buckets.

Amazon SES

Use the Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) actions to send and manage SES emails.

Amazon SimpleDB

Use the Amazon SimpleDB actions to run queries on structured data in real time.

Amazon SQS

Use Amazon SQS (Simple Queue Service) actions to move data between distributed components of your applications that perform different tasks without losing messages or requiring each component to be always available.

Azure Storage

Azure actions allow you to interact with your Azure storage.

BASIC Script

Use the BASIC Script action to run BASIC scripts.

Compression

Allow for automatic compression/decompression of files using commonly-used formats.

Computer

Use the Computer actions to control the computer's Start menu Power button features, such as log off.

Cryptography

Provides encryption automation to secure files before they are transported.

Database

Enable the execution of SQL queries and stored procedures on any

Dialog

These actions allow for user interaction with and input to tasks.

DLL

Use the DLL actions to execute a specified method in a managed or unmanaged dynamic-link library (DLL) and store the return value of the method in a variable.

Dynamics CRM

Use the Dynamics CRM action to automate a variety of common CRM operations.

Email

Use the Email action to automate common to complex email operations and simultaneously manage several e-mail accounts from as many mail servers as required.

Environment Variables

Use this action to perform the creation, manipulation, and management of environment variables.

Event Log

Use this action to log specified events to the Windows Event Log.

Excel

Allow for automation of data input and retrieval from Microsoft Excel spreadsheets and templates.

Exchange

Use this action to create and manage Exchange objects and sessions.

File System

File actions enable automation of file and folder commands such as copy, move, rename, delete, etc. These actions also allow data to be read from and written to files.

FTP

Use this action to send specific commands to an FTP server (upload, download, create folder, remove folder, and so on).

HTTP

Use this action to automate common HTTP operations, such as GET, PUT, POST, DELETE, and more.

If

Use this action to perform if/then operations in Advanced Workflows . (See also Select.)

Image

Use this action to perform common tasks on images, such as resize, rotate, crop, flip, etc.

Label

Use this task to label and go to a specific point in a workflow.

Loop

Provide the ability to loop through data sets, files, processes, lists, and more for dynamic automation.

MSMQ

Use the MSMQ action for MSMQ message delivery and retrieval. It contains individual activities that lets you to create, send, retrieve, clear, delete or wait for MSMQ messages on a local or remote machine.

Network

Network actions enable drive mapping and the sending of network messages.

OCR

Use this action to convert typewritten, handwritten, or printed text as well as text contained in images to a variable or dataset, making it possible to search for a word or phrase, store text more compactly, and apply techniques such as text mining or text to speech.

OpenDocument Spreadsheet

Use this action to manipulate spreadsheet contents, format cells, and protect files.

PDF

Use the PDF action to streamline document creation and sharing, and automate an assortment of common PDF operations.

PowerShell

Use the PowerShell action to embed existing PowerShell scripts to a task or point to an external .PS1 file to allow for seamless integration with other actions.

Printer

Use the Printer action to get, remove, and set a default printer, and print documents.

Processes

Use this action to start, stop, control, and query a process.

Registry

Use this action to create, manipulate, rename, and delete registry keys, sub-keys or value data.

Run

Use this action to run a specified program, application, or document.

Security

Security actions allow for user authentication in the context of a task.

Select

Use the Select action instead of If for more complex decisions where there are several possible answers (e.g., favorite color=red, blue, green or yellow)

Services

The Services action provides various ways to the management of local or remote services, including operations such as starting, stopping, installing, uninstalling, or querying for a list of services installed on the system along with their current state.

SharePoint

Use this action to automate all SharePoint business and IT processes.

SNMP

Allow for automatic processing of SNMP(simple network messaging protocol) events that occur on the network.

Task

The Task action allows task-level operations to be performed during runtime, including starting a secondary task (also known as a child task or subtask) from a parent task or start another task as a separate thread, stop execution of the current task, or call a function defined in the task.

Terminal

Enable automation of all terminal emulation and Telnet processes.

Text

Text actions enable the manipulation and parsing of textual data.

Timer

Used to gauge the execution time between selected steps.

Type

The Type action is used to create an object from the defined custom type or web service, and define a custom object type or object types defined in a Web Service or import Web Service or .Net assembly types.

Variables

Provide the ability to create and perform complex programming elements such as creating and running variables and datasets.

VMWare Guest

Provides VMWare guest OS operations.

VMWare Host

Provides VM host OS operations.

Wait

Wait actions provide the ability to pause task execution until a specified system event (e.g., the appearance of a file) transpires.

Web Service

This action allows you to automate the ability to execute Web Service calls via WSDL (Web Service Definition Language) URI (Uniform Resource Identifier) path.

WMI

The WMI - Query action can monitor and control managed resources on a local or remote computer, thus improving manageability of computers in a networked environment.

XML

Allows XML parsing and manipulation.