Relationship: Get All Properties Action

The Get All Properties action is a special action of an element type that returns all properties of a specific element or list of elements. Use it to ensure that all required element properties are available before any other action executes on the element.

The main purpose of this action is to improve performance when working with element lists. It often requires one service to receive a list of elements with a few basic properties, and a second service to retrieve all properties of a specific element. Using both services in a single “Get Element List” action would often cause an immense I/O overhead. For this reason a Get All Properties action can be modelled which executes automatically at a specified point of time before any other action can be executed on an element. The time of execution and the execution rate of the Get All Properties action can be set by the attributes of the Get All Properties action relationship of an element type.

By default, the Get All Properties action is available in the context menu of an element under the label Refresh. The Get All Properties Action is not available in the context menu of an action if the Execution Point is modeled as Before Context Menu and the Execution Rate is modeled as Always. In this case, the action is implicitly called every time the context menu is opened.

It is possible to subsequently execute the Get All Properties action manually from the element’s context menu.

To update the element’s properties, the action contains at least one tool with UPDATE or TOOL-DEFINED resource processing. See Tool-defined Resource Operations for more information.

Attribute Type Description
Execution Point * Selection Specifies at which point of time the Get All Properties action should be executed. If Before Context Menu is selected, the Get All Properties action is executed before the context menu is opened. If an action is executed without opening the context menu (Default Action / Get Children Action / Key Binding) the Get All Properties action is also executed. If Before Action is selected, the Get All Properties action is executed before the execution of an action.

Valid values:

  • BeforeAction (Default)
  • BeforeContextMenu
Execution Rate * Selection Specifies how frequently the Get All Properties action is to be executed. If Once is selected then the Get All Properties action executes only once at the specified Execution Point. If Always is selected then the Get All Properties action executes every time the specified Execution Point is reached.

Valid values:

  • Always
  • Once (Default)
Target ID * ActionDescriptor The reference to the action descriptor.
Enabled Condition Enabled Condition This complex attribute allows you to define rules specifying the conditions in which the Get All Properties action is activated. Non-activated actions are disabled, that is they cannot be executed by the user.

If you allow multi-selections in the model, it is recommended you support mass processing for the Get All Properties action. If executed automatically, the Workflow Manager only adds elements to the mass processing context that require updates to their properties. See Mass Processing Overview for more information.

Note: When designing a custom tool to return all properties of a specific element type, it is not enough to only return “missing” properties of the element (properties which were not returned when the element list was generated). This is not recommended, since the “Get All Properties” action can not be used to refresh elements in this case. As the name suggests, “Get All Properties” actions should always return all available properties for the corresponding element type.