Action Tracker Plugin

Page contents

• Features
• Syntax Rules
  • Actions
  • Action searches
  • Date formats
    • Absolute date formats
    • Relative date formats
  • People
  • Groups
  • UIDs
• Notification
  • Translating names to e-mail addresses
• Customization
  • Formatting search tables
  • User Defined Attributes
  • Searching for non-standard attributes
• ActionTrackerPlugin Settings
  • Formatting how actions are displayed
  • Formatting actions for editing
  • Debugging
• Plugin Installation Instructions
• Plugin Info

Adds support for action tags in topics, and automatic notification of action statuses

This plugin provides support for tracking actions embedded in topics. Actions captured this way can then be searched from any topic in the wiki.

Features

• Actions are embedded in topics.
• List actions using searches.
• Automatic e-mail notification of changes.
• Assign actions to individuals, or to predefined groups.
• Pop-up action editor.
• Fully configurable - add your own action attributes.

This plugin is particularly useful for meeting minutes. As you write the minutes during the meeting, you simply enter the actions into the text, and as soon as the topic is saved, the actions "go live". For example, at a recent meeting of the British Cabinet:

GordonBrown agreed to a zero tax rate for all self-employed software engineers, to make up for past unfair treatment.
%ACTION{who="GordonBrown" due="5th April 2008"}% Repay all unfairly levied taxes %ENDACTION%
%ACTION{who="AlistairDarling" due="25th Dec 2007"}% Contact Santa to find out who is going to pay for it %ENDACTION%
AlistairDarling observed that this might adversely impact the government hors d'ouvres budget.

But that's not the only application. The action tracker can also be used for:

• personal to-do lists
• highlighting things for attention
• reminding you of important events

Actions are nicely formatted for display, and automatic notification of actions is supported using 'cron'.

Actions are embedded into topics so you can easily edit them, and even process them with other tools. No separate database to worry about!

Syntax Rules

Actions

Note: if you have used this plugin with TWiki you may note that the syntax of actions has changed. The plugin still recognises the old syntax, and will automatically upgrade topics when you edit them.

Write the command %ACTION{ attributes }% ...  %ENDACTION% anywhere in a topic, where ... represents the action description. Standard attributes are

Name	Value	Description	Auto-completed
who	See People	The person or team responsible for completing the action.	current user
due	See Date Formats	The due date
state	open or closed	Set to open if the action is still open; set to closed if the action is closed. To extend the state set, see User defined attributes.	open
notify	See People	wikinames, or e-mail addresses, of people to notify when the action changes. See Notification for details on action notification.
creator	See People	Who created the action.	current user
created	See Date Formats	Date the action was created.	today
closer	See People	Who closed the action.	if (and only if) state="closed", current user
closed	See Date Formats	Date the action was closed, if ever.	if (and only if) state="closed", today
uid	6 digit number	Unique ID of the action. See UIDs.	calculated

For example,

%ACTION{ who="TWikiGuest" due="2 Jan 2004" state="open" notify="AttillaTheHun" }% An action for TWikiGuest %ENDACTION%
%ACTION{ who="LittleOysters" due="2 Jan 1884" state="open" }%
The time has come, the walrus said,
To speak of many things.
Of shoes, and ships, and sealing wax,
Of cabbages and kings.
%ENDACTION%

The fields with an entry in the 'Auto-completed' column are automatically filled in, if they are missing, whenever someone saves the topic containing the action. The default values are as indicated in the table. You can override this behaviour by providing values for any of these attributes when you type the action. Note: you must not provide a value for the uid (see UIDs) field!

Note that the due field is not auto-completed. If you don't specify a due date for an action, the action is treated as due on a 'to be decided' (TBD) date. TBD actions are always shown in action searches, to help encourage you to timeframe them.

Action searches

Write the command %ACTIONSEARCH{ attributes }% anywhere in a topic. Standard attributes are

Name	Value	Description
who	See People	Person responsible for closing the action.
notify	See People	Persons who want to be notified of a change
state	late, or any legal state value	Set to late to search for late actions; set to any any legal state value to search for actions in that state. See Settings for details on how to extend the state set. You can also use a Perl regular expression, which must match the entire state name e.g. state="open|closed" will match either open or closed states, but no other states, and state="(?!closed).*" will match every state except closed. Google for perlre for help with Perl regular expressions.
within	a number of days	Search for actions that are within a number of days of their due date. Usually used in conjunction with other attributes, such as state="open". If you give it a simple number N, it will match actions that are due within N days either side of the current date. If you give N with a leading '+', this restricts the search to N days in the future. If you give N with a leading '-', it matches only actions that fell due in the last N days.
web	Perl regular expression	A regular expression that matches the names of all the webs to search. If this attribute is omitted, the default is to search only the current web. Searching many webs is much slower, especially in a large installation. Webs marked NOSEARCHALL will not be searched. If you want to force %ACTIONSEARCH% only searchs current web, you can setup "$TWiki::cfg{Plugins}{ActionTrackerPlugin}{SearchCurrentWebOnly} = 1" to disable searching on other webs.
topic	Perl regular expression	A regular expression that matches the names of all the topics to search. If this attribute is omitted, the default is to search all the topics in the selected webs.
due	Absolute or relative date expression. See Date Formats	Due date for the action.
creator	See People	Who created the action.
created	Absolute or relative date expression. See Date Formats	Date the action was created.
closed	Absolute or relative date expression. See Date Formats	Date the action was closed, if ever.
closer	See People	Who closed the action.
uid	6 digit number	Unique ID of the action.
format	Presentation format	See Formatting tables
header	Presentation format	See Formatting tables
footer	Presentation format	See Formatting tables
orient	Presentation format	See Formatting tables
separator	Presentation format	See Formatting tables
sort	Comma-separated list of field names	Fields to sort the matched actions by. For example, sort="$who,$due" will sort by who first and then due. This field is optional; by default the table will be sorted by due date.

For example,

%ACTIONSEARCH{ who="me" state="late" }%
%ACTIONSEARCH{ who="me" open late }%
%ACTIONSEARCH{ who="TWikiGuest" state="open" within="7" }%
%ACTIONSEARCH{ web=".*" who="Genghis.Khan@mongol.empire.org" state="open" within="7" }%

When you are searching for fields containing dates (such as closed, created and due) you can prepend one of the conditions >, <, >= and <= to the date. For example, closed=">1-Jan-1999" will match all actions that have been closed at any time since 1-Jan-1999, and created=">= 1-Jan-2000" will match all actions created this century. You can also specify dates relative to the current date and time. See Date Formats for details of how to specify relative dates. For example,

%ACTIONSEARCH{ state="closed" closed="> 7 days ago"}%

will search for all actions closed in the last 7 days.

Date formats

Absolute date formats

Absolute dates are required in action specifications. Date formats must be as recognised by Time::ParseDate. The following absolute date formats are recognised. Dates containing spaces must be enclosed in double-quotes.

• Dow, dd Month yy
• Dow, dd Month yyyy
• Dow, dd Month
• dd Month yy
• dd Month yyyy
• Month day{st,nd,rd,th}, year
• Month dd yyyy
• yyyy/mm/dd
• yyyy/mm
• mm/dd/yy
• mm/dd/yyyy
• mm/yy
• yy/mm (only if year > 12)
• yy/mm/dd (only if year > 12 and day < 32)

You are strongly recommended never to use the 'mm/dd/yy or mm/dd/yyyy' formats, to avoid confusing users outside of the US, Micronesia, the Phillipines and Palau (these are the only places in the world that use mm/dd/yyyy). Note that due to limitations in the Time::Parsedate module, dates before 1970 will not work as expected.

Relative date formats

When you are searching for fields containing dates (such as closed, created and due) you can specify dates relative to the current date and time. For example:

Syntax	Example	Notes
Dow after next	Tuesday after next
Dow	Tuesday	last Tuesday
next Dow	next Thursday
tomorrow	tomorrow
today	today
yesterday	yesterday
last dow	last wednesday
last week	last week	7 days ago
now	now
now + count units	now + 2 years
now - count units	now - 3 weeks
+ count units	+ 31 days
- count units	- 2 months
count units ago	10 days ago

Valid units are minutes, hours, days, weeks, years.

People

People are identified to the action tracker using a wikiname (e.g. Main.WilliamWallace or simply WilliamWallace) or an e-mail address (e.g. a_einstein@pto.co.ch). The e-mail address is useful if you want to notify people who aren't registered in the wiki, but bear in mind that if they are outside your firewall, they'll get action notifications but the chances are they won't be able to edit pages and close actions. Very annoying!

E-mail addresses of people are found by the process described below.

You can also use the shorthand me for the currently logged-in user (this is the guest user unless you have been prompted for a username and password). In actions, this will automatically be expanded when the topic is saved, and in searches it will match the currently logged in user.

Groups

You can assign an action to a group. Alternatively you can give a list of people as the value of the attribute. For example,

%ACTION{who=TWikiAdminGroup ...}%
%ACTION{who="KnutHaraldsen,MagnusMagnusson" ...}%

Note in general you should not use these mechanisms for assigning actions, because the actions so created are not specific. Actions should be assigned to one person only, so that it's clear who is responsible for them.

UIDs

For administrators only: Each action is assigned a Unique Identifier (UID) when it is created. This UID is a six-digit number, and is generated when the action is first saved by incrementing a number in a special file (pub/_work_areas/ActionTrackerPlugin/UIDRegister under the installation). If this file is accidentally deleted, or is not writable, then you will have problems and you may get duplicate UIDs. Normally this won't matter a hoot, as UIDs only have to be unique within a single topic, but if the file is persistantly inaccessible it could be a bit of a nuisance.

Notification

ActionTrackerPlugin comes with a notifier script, like the mailnotify script used for WebNotify. This script allows you to:

• examine all the actions in all webs (except those specified NOSEARCHALL) and notify owners of the state of actions,
• find actions that have changed state, and notify people who have registered an interest in that action.

The frequency with which actions are notified depends on how you set up your cron (or equivalent) jobs on the server.

Be careful what user you use to run this script. It will write the TWiki log files, and if these log files are left in a state where they can't be written to by the TWiki server, you may break your site.

The actionnotify script interprets its parameters as a search expression of the same type as that used in %ACTIONSEARCH%. All actions which match that expression will be notified to their owners. For example:

 actionnotify "header=\"| Assigned to | Due ||\"" format=\"'| $who | $due | $edit |'\" state="open" 

Note that the actionnotify script must be run from the bin directory. This is so it can pick up the path configuration file, setlib.cfg.

For example, you could set up the cron jobs as follows:

0 * * * * cd /home/twiki/bin && ../tools/actionnotify "state=\"late\""
0 8,16 * * * cd /home/twiki/bin && ../tools/actionnotify "state=\"open\" within=\"3\""
0 0 * * * cd /home/twiki/bin && ../tools/actionnotify "state=\"open\" within=\"7\"
0 0 * * 1 cd /home/twiki/bin && ../tools/actionnotify "state=\"open\" within=\"30\"

(If you don't know cron, the first 5 fields are minute, hour, day of month, month and day of week. * means 'every'). This crontab will notify actions according to the schedule:

1. Actions that are late will be notified every hour, on the hour
2. Actions that are still open within three days of their due date will be notified twice a day, at 8am and 4pm
3. Actions that are still open within seven days of their due date will be notified once a day, at midnight.
4. Actions that are still open within thirty days of their due date will be notified once a week, at midnight on monday.

A rather aggressive schedule!

Note: At Wind River they notify folks three times a week on Mon, Wed and Fri for open action items due within 8 days. Crontab entry for geeks:

0 0 * * 1,3,5 (cd .../bin; ../tools/actionnotify state=open within=8 'web=[CEIMPSW].*' > .../logs/actionnotify.txt 2>&1)

You can configure the fields which are scanned to detect state changes; see Settings.

Translating names to e-mail addresses

The wikiname of the user to be notified is translated to a mail address according to the following rules:

• If the user has a personal page, and that personal page contains a line or lines matching
  spaces * Email: email address
  or
  spaces * E-mail: email address
  Alternatively if the topic is a group definition (the name ends in 'Group') then the line
  spaces * Set GROUP =
  is used to determine the wikinames of the people in the group. These are resolved to email addresses recursively. If that fails,
• If they appear in any WebNotify in any web, in the form of a line that gives an email address, then that address is used.
• If this fails and the 'who' name is a valid e-mail address, for example person@domain.co.uk, then that name is used.

Note: If a name cannot be translated to an e-mail address using the mechanisms described above, a warning will be output to data/warning.txt..

The actionnotify script is also used to notify users who have registered an interest in being notified when an action changes. This function of the script is activated when you use the changedsince parameter. changedsince is used to specify the time period within which changed actions are interesting. Any action which has changed in the given period will be notified to all users who have registered an interest in that action using notify. The changedsince value is a relative date string, which uses the following formats

• yesterday
• last dow
• last week
• now - count units
• - count units
• count units ago

where units may be minutes, days, hours, weeks, months or even years. count is just an integer. dow is the name of a day of the week. For example:

changedsince="last monday"
changedsince="now - 3 days"
changedsince="- 36 hours"
changedsince="3 days ago"

Obviously you have to be careful to synchronise your changedsince expression with the activation of your cron job. The ideal is to specify the same delta as the gap between cron activations. For example,

0 0 * * * cd /home/twiki/bin && ../tools/actionnotify 'web="News" changedsince="yesterday"'

will notify registered users of action changes that occurred in the last 24 hours. Note the use of single quotes to prevent expansion in the shell.

Notes:

1. Not all action changes get notified, only changes to certain sensitive fields. You can change the set of fields that are sensitive to changes by setting the NOTIFYCHANGES parameter, as described in Settings, below.
2. Unlike all other search terms, changedsince works as an OR term rather than an AND term. If you use a compound expression like late,changedsince=yesterday, this will not give you all late actions that changed since yesterday. Instead, it will give you all late actions and all actions that changed since yesterday.
3. If you give the parameter DEBUG to the actionnotify script, it will print out the mails that would have been sent to STDOUT. This is useful for debugging, and may be useful if you have some other processing in mind (such as piping to an alternative mail program).
4. changedsince requires RCS, and will not work with RcsLite.

Customization

Formatting search tables

The header, footer, =format, separator and orient parameters of %ACTIONSEARCH{}% support formatting of the action table using a similar syntax to that described in FormattedSearch. For example:

%ACTIONSEARCH{ web="Directors" state="open" format="|$who|$text|$edit|" header="|*Director*|*Films*||" footer="|*Director*|*Films*|" separator="$n" orient="rows" }%

The available $formattingtokens are:

Name:	Expands To:
$who	Who is responsible for the action
$due	When the action is due
$state	Current state of the action (see also note below)
$notify	Who to notify when the action state changes
$closed	When the action was closed, and who closed it
$creator	Who created the action
$created	When the action was created
$edit	A link to the action editor for this action
$uid	Unique identifier for the action
$web	Name of the web containing the action
$topic	Topic name containing the action
$text	Formatted action text
$link	An icon that links to tha actual action
$n or $n()	New line
$nop or $nop()	Is a "no operation". This variable gets removed.
$quot	Double quote (").
$percnt	Percent sign (%)
$dollar	Dollar sign ($)
$statebutton(name,state)	Displays a button that will change the current state of the action to the named state. If the action is already in that state, nothing is displayed. name is the string used in the button and state is the name of the target state e.g. $statebutton(Close,closed)

The header and format parameters can also be used with the actionnotify script.

A default format for actions and action search results can be defined in this topic or the WebPreferences topic of the current web. See Settings for more details.

User Defined Attributes

As well as the standard attributes you can add non-standard attributes to actions, and use them in searches. For example:

%ACTION{ who="EmperorHadrian" due="1 Jan 0053" state="closed" legion="7th" cohort="6th" maniple="3rd" }% Build a wall to keep the Scots out of England %ENDACTION%

User defined attributes must be lower-case words. The following names may not be used for non-standard attributes: closed, closer, created, creator, dollar, due, edit, format, header, late, n, nop, notify, percnt, quot, sort, state, text, topic, uid, web, who, within.

To define non-standard attributes you need to set the value of ACTIONTRACKERPLUGIN_EXTRAS - see Settings below. All attributes must be given a type, which is used by the formatter, the search engine and the action editor. For example,

   * Set ACTIONTRACKERPLUGIN_EXTRAS = |plaintiffs,names,16|decision,text,16|sentencing,date|sentence,select,"life","5 years","community service"|

The following types are supported:

Type	Format	Description
select	select, size, "option 1", "option 2", ...	Can take one of the string values option1, option2,.... etc.
names	names, size	One or more wikinames or e-mail addresses.
text	text, size	An arbitrary text field
date	date, size	A date in one of the formats described above. See Date Formats

In the above, size is a single number, which is the width (in characters) of the text box in the action editor for text, names and date, and the number of options to show in select..

Note that there is one exception to the "no redefinition" rule above; the state attribute can be extended to take extra states. However if you want the closure functionality (closed, closer, and late actions) to work, the closed state must be retained. To extend the set of states, simply include a definition of state in the ACTIONTRACKERPLUGIN_EXTRAS definition:

   * Set ACTIONTRACKERPLUGIN_EXTRAS = |state,select,1,"open","fried","boiled","poached","closed"|

Searching for non-standard attributes

You can of course search for values of non-standard attributes. For example:

%ACTIONSEARCH{ sentence="life" }%

If a non-standard attribute is declared as type text you can use perl regular expressions in the search. Searches for values of type names will match any-to-any. For example,

%ACTIONSEARCH{ car="VolkswagenBeetle,MercedesCoupe" }%

will match both of the following actions:

%ACTION{ car="VolkswagenBeetle,AudiSport" ... }% ... %ENDACTION%
%ACTION{ car="ToyotaSupra,MercedesCoupe,ColtLancer" ... }% ... %ENDACTION%

ActionTrackerPlugin Settings

The following preferences control different aspects of the action tracker's behaviour. You can override the defaults for these preferences in Main.TWikiPreferences, the WebPreferences topic of the current web, or in individual topics, using the standard 'Set' syntax e.g:

   * Set ACTIONTRACKERPLUGIN_EDITORIENT = rows

Formatting how actions are displayed

The default format of an action output, unless overridden by format, header etc. The following fields can be output: web, topic, text, who, due, notify, uid, creator, state, edit, and any ACTIONTRACKERPLUGIN_EXTRAS you may have. TABLEHEADER defines the column headings, TABLEFORMAT defines the contents of the columns, and if TABLEORIENT is set to rows, action tables will be aligned as rows of values instead of the default columns of values.

Preference	Default
ACTIONTRACKERPLUGIN_TABLEHEADER	| Assigned to | Due date | Description | State | Notify ||
ACTIONTRACKERPLUGIN_TABLEFORMAT	| $who | $due | $text $link | $state | $notify | $edit |
ACTIONTRACKERPLUGIN_TABLEORIENT	cols

The alternative text format of an action, as seen by a mail recipient who doesn't accept HTML in mail. Used when mailing action or change notifications.

ACTIONTRACKERPLUGIN_TEXTFORMAT

Action for $who, due $due, $state$n$text$n

Full URL of the CSS to use in formatting actions. This file is also called from the mail generated by the actionnotify script, so you have to use an absolute URL here, and the URL has to be visible to anyone who might receive an action notification.

Preference	Default
ACTIONTRACKERPLUGIN_CSS	%PUBURL%/%SYSTEMWEB%/ActionTrackerPlugin/styles.css

If an action has no due date defined when it is created, then it is treated (for sorting etc) as if it was due at this time. This is a number of seconds since 1st Jan 1970, and should be 0 to sort actions that have no due date to the start of a list, or a very large number to sort them to the end.

Preference	Default
ACTIONTRACKERPLUGIN_DEFAULTDUE	9999999999

Formatting actions for editing

The format of the fields in the action editor are set by:

Preference	Default
ACTIONTRACKERPLUGIN_EDITHEADER	| Assigned to | Due date | State | Notify |
ACTIONTRACKERPLUGIN_EDITFORMAT	| $who | $due | $state | $notify |
ACTIONTRACKERPLUGIN_EDITORIENT	cols

You can also override the default EDITBOXWIDTH and EDITBOXHEIGHT settings just for the action editor:

Preference	Default
ACTIONTRACKERPLUGIN_EDITBOXWIDTH	70
ACTIONTRACKERPLUGIN_EDITBOXHEIGHT	22

If you prefer the action editor to use the same browser window to edit an action, or you don't have Javascript, set this to 0. If set to 1 will edit an action in a separate browser window.

Preference	Default
ACTIONTRACKERPLUGIN_USENEWWINDOW	1

If you want the action editor to offer a 'Preview Changes' button, instead of the usual 'Save Changes', set this to 0. If this is set, and USENEWWINDOW is 1, the subwindow should close on save, but it won't because I haven't worked out how to do this safely in JavaScript.

Preference	Default
ACTIONTRACKERPLUGIN_NOPREVIEW	1

The fields to scan to detect changes for actionnotify. Changes in other fields are ignored.

Preference	Default
ACTIONTRACKERPLUGIN_NOTIFYCHANGES	$who,$due,$state,$text

User defined attributes - see User defined attributes above.

Preference	Default
ACTIONTRACKERPLUGIN_EXTRAS	none

If set to 1, the action tracker will show action states using a drop-down menu, to allow viewers to quickly and easily change action states. You can disable this feature by setting this to 0.

Preference	Default
ACTIONTRACKERPLUGIN_ENABLESTATESHORTCUT	1

Note that each state has an associated CSS class (e.g. atpStateopen) that is used to render the HTML 'select' element when ENABLESTATESHORTCUT is on. If you extend the range of states, you will need to add new CSS classes as well.

The strings used by the $button$ switch. A =$closebutton is a special

Preference	Default
ACTIONTRACKERPLUGIN_CLOSEBUTTONNAME	Close
ACTIONTRACKERPLUGIN_CLOSEBUTTONCLOSED	Closed

Debugging

Set to 1 to enable debug features, including the undocumented %ACTIONNOTIFICATIONS{}% and %ACTIONTRACKERPREFS% features.

Preference	Default
ACTIONTRACKERPLUGIN_DEBUG	0

Plugin Installation Instructions

• For an automated installation, run the configure script and follow "Find More Extensions" in the in the Extensions section.
  • See the installation supplement on TWiki.org for more information.

• Or, follow these manual installation steps:
  • Download the ZIP file from the extension home on twiki.org (see below).
  • Unzip ActionTrackerPlugin.zip in your twiki installation directory.
  • Set the ownership of the extracted directories and files to the webserver user.
  • Install the dependencies (if any).

• Plugin configuration and testing:
  • Run the configure script and enable the plugin in the Plugins section.
  • Configure additional plugin settings in the Extensions section if needed.
  • Test if the installation was successful using the examples provided.

• If the plugin is installed and enabled correctly you should see a formatted action below:

Due date	Description	State
2010-10-10	Example action	openclosed	edit

• ... and the result of a formatted search below:

Who	TWikiGuest
Due	2010-10-10
State	openclosed
Description	Example action

Note that if you want to use the action template shipped with the TWiki:Plugins.CommentPlugin to create actions, then you must put the CommentPlugin before the ActionTrackerPlugin in the {PluginsOrder} configuration option.

Plugin Info

Thanks are due to the following sponsors, who have helped make this plugin possible:

• Motorola
• Wind River Systems
• Goldstar Events

Author:	CrawfordCurrie
Copyright	Copyright © 2002-2003 Motorola. All Rights Reserved. Copyright © 2004-2009 Crawford Currie Copyright © 2002-2020 TWiki:TWiki.TWikiContributor
License:	GPL (GNU General Public License)
Plugin Version:	2020-04-13

Dependencies:	Name Version Description Time::ParseDate >=2003.0211 Required. Available from the CPAN:Time::ParseDate archive. Text::Soundex >=0 Required. Available from the CPAN:Text::Soundex archive. TWiki::Plugins >=1.1 TWiki 4 TWiki::Plugins::DatePickerPlugin >=2013-01-09 Optional.
Plugin Home:	http://TWiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Plugins/ActionTrackerPlugin
Feedback:	http://TWiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Plugins/ActionTrackerPluginDev

Related Topics: ActionTrackerPluginQBE, TWikiPreferences, TWikiPlugins