How do I manage actions that are exposed to users in the Actions Bar?

You can control which actions are available to users in the Action Bar.

Within the Action Bar there are two types of actions:

• Smart Actions are actions a user can perform, such as Add (related object such as contact or team member), Compose email or Start internal conversations, and so on.
• Suggested Actions (also known as meta actions) are those such as Search Knowledge, Filter the activity stream, and Update fields.

Using Visual Builder Studio, you can give access to some actions to users while disabling others.

In your implementation, controlling which actions are available to users enables you to better enforce your specific business rules and ensure compliance to your organizational processes.

Overview

Use Visual Builder Studio to expose your applications, then follow this overview:

To control and manage available actions, access this page level variable $page.variable.ext_actionBarProps.

You'll want to invoke this page variable from the Service Request Edit page which contains the full action bar.

Note: There are a few pages within the application that have a limited Action Bar such as the Service Contact Page and the Interaction Page. These pages have a limited set of available actions and aren't applicable to this scenario.

Using the $page.variable.ext_actionBarProps variable, Smart Actions and Suggestions are controlled differently.

For the three Suggested Actions (Search Knowledge, Update Fields, Filter Activity Stream), there's Boolean values where you can turn on and off the access. The default setting for these values is True (on). To disable one or more of these values, you'll want to set that variable to False.

Here's the variable names:

• updateFields: Enable or disable updating a record's fields from the Action Bar.
• kmSearch: Enable or disable Knowledge Searching from the Action Bar.
• activityStreamFiltering: Enable or disable the filtering of the Activity Stream from the Action Bar.

Example of disabling Update Fields

- Disable 'Update <field>', everything else enabled
{
"updateFields": false,
"kmSearch": true,
"activityStreamFiltering": true
}

Example of Disabling all Suggested Actions

- Disable 'Update <field', 'Filter <x>' and 'Search Knowledge'
{
"updateFields": false,
"kmSearch": false,
"activityStreamFiltering": false,
}

Note: If you disable one of the Suggested Actions, you'll need to specify the state (True or False) for all three. Once the default value of one variable has been changed, all must be explicitly set.

Controlling Smart Actions

To control default Smart Actions,use the same page variable $page.variable.ext_actionBarProps. These actions have two different control options:

Controlling Smart Actions:

• excludeActionsList: Disable specific Smart Actions from being presented by the Action Bar.
• limitedActionsList: Only present specific Smart Actions within the Action Bar.

For both the Exclude and Limit functions, you'll have to have the defined user action name. To get a list of all user action names, use this API: crmRestApi/resources/latest/smartActionsMetadata?q=IncludedIn='ServiceRequestVO'

Note: If you're using the Exclude or Limit functions, you'll also need to specify the Boolean values for the Suggested Actions.

Let's look at an example. Here we'll exclude the Add Internal Note Smart Action:

- Enable 'Update <field', 'Filter <x>' and 'Search Knowledge'; exclude "Compose Internal Note"
{ "updateFields": true,
"kmSearch": true,
"activityStreamFiltering": true,
"excludeActionsList": ["SDA-AddInternalNote-serviceRequests"] }

The excludeActionsList and limitedActionsLista actions are either, or options. The excludeActionsList action takes precedence over the limitedActionsListaction if both are set.

Tips and Considerations

• If you change the out of box value for a Suggested Action (Boolean Value) you must specify the value for all three options.
• If you're using the exclude or limited options for Smart Actions, you must also specify the Boolean values for the Suggested Actions, even you keep the out of box Boolean value of True, you must explicitly specify the value.