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Analytics > Designing an Action

Designing an Action

Actions allow data and calculations to become interactive. Actions provide functionality to navigate to related content or a Web page

You can include actions in analyses and dashboard pages. Actions can be executed:

• Explicitly by end users who click action links that are embedded within:
  • Analyses on column headings, column values, and hierarchy level values, in certain views, such as graphs, and on totals and grand totals within tables and pivot tables
  • Dashboard pages
• Directly from the Home page or from the Catalog page

For example, a sales director wants to meet with the sales manager of any region where sales drop below a certain threshold. You might embed an action object into the sales director's dashboard to enable the sales managers to schedule such a meeting simply by clicking a link.

About Action Links and Action Link Menus

Action links and action link menus provide interactivity to data presentations. An action link is a link to an action that you have embedded in an analysis or a dashboard page that, when clicked, runs an associated action.

In analyses, multiple action links are displayed in a list. On a dashboard page, you can add action links as standalone links or you can group multiple action links together on action link menus. An action link menu lets users select, from a list of action links, the appropriate action to be executed based on the business insight that they gained from the data.

Additionally, you can conditionally show each action link, depending on the data. This powerful functionality enables you to set up context-sensitive menus that present users with the appropriate next steps based on the data that is displayed.

Action links that you add to analyses are displayed to users in the following views:

• Funnel graphs
• Gauges
• Graphs
• Map views
• Performance Tiles
• Pivot tables
• Tables
• Trellises
• Treemaps

Note: Action links are not included in exported formats, for example, Excel and PDF.

For more information, see the following:

• Creating an Action
• Setting Action Options
• Selecting Content for an Action