krileonA new release of CB Auto Actions is here with some great new usability features to better help you utilize triggers to their fullest and more!
Support for Joomla API Token authentication is now implemented for directly accessed auto actions. Simply add &format=jsonapi to the auto action URL and any Joomla API Token sent along with the URL (typically as a Bearer token) will authenticate the token owner and set them as the User for the auto action. You no longer need custom API key solutions and can simply utilize Joomla's!
JSON responses are now strictly enforced. When an Output of an auto action is set to JSON it will guarantee a JSON response. The same applies for directly accessed auto actions with &format=json or &format=jsonapi. Any auto action content that isn't valid JSON will be put into a {response:"CONTENT"} JSON object. This allows for safe and reliable JSON access of auto actions.
Onto something amazing! A Trigger helper is now entirely built in! This helper can provide descriptive text about a trigger and its variables making it much easier to utilize triggers and avoid having to search around trying to reference various documentation.
Not all triggers have variables though so those without any helper data simply won't display in the helper section. This is designed so that we can manually add descriptive text where needed to improve the understanding of triggers. For now only a handful have such text, but we'll add as needed with each release. In a future release we'll be able to automate this a bit more, but for now it's just a JSON file containing trigger information. We hope this will help ease the burden of trying to figure out what data a trigger provides.
Auto Action chaining has always been a bit of a pain. You had to act on a trigger and carefully condition to be sure to avoid an infinite loop. You no longer have to do any of this with the "Next Action" parameter. This new parameter can be found under any auto actions Parameters tab. Auto actions eligible for this are those that have direct access disabled and have no triggers selected. Their access checks and conditions are also still checked. They will be given the contents and the id of their parent auto action and the user will be passed from their parent auto action as well.
Some use cases here would be custom form processing or additional behavior after updating a profile field. So for example Auto Action 1 saves a forms data, Auto Action 2 sends an email about the data, then finally Auto Action 3 displays a custom thank you page. At each point of this process the auto action is allowed to interrupt the chain. So if Auto Action 2 in this example has an Output then it will interrupt and prevent Auto Action 3 from firing so be mindful of configurations!
New condition operators "Starts With" and "Ends With" have now been implemented. These let you check if a string starts with a string or ends with a string. Previously you had to use REGEX operators for this. This significantly simplifies the process and the underlying functions used are much faster than REGEX.
Another big new feature is support for processing images in Fields and Registrations auto action types. If an image URL, DataURI, or the input name of a file input is set as an image fields value (or avatar/canvas for Registration auto action) it will process and upload the image properly and safely. This makes it much easier now to set image fields from external systems!
Profile Alias field handling in the Field auto action also now has fallback behavior. This will guarantee that an alias WILL save so you can rest assured that it won't accidently skip a user due to duplicate alias, which it will simply suffix with a digit.
For a full list of changes visit our forge below.
https://forge.joomlapolis.com/projects/cb-cbautoactions/issues?query_id=260
If you're interested in CB Auto Actions please be sure to check out its page below.