0463 Engine Actions¶
An Engine action describes some processing that is part of the governance of an organization's assets or the metadata that describes them.
EngineAction entity¶
A EngineAction entity is an Action used to control the execution of a single call to a governance service.
The creation of an EngineAction entity typically triggers the execution of a governance service in a governance engine. As the governance service runs, the governance engine adds information to the EngineAction describing the status of the governance service and the actions taken against specific resources (see TargetForAction). Once the action is complete, the EngineAction entity acts as an audit record for the actions taken.
TargetForAction relationship¶
The TargetForAction relationship links the engine action to the action targets for the governance service that will run.
- actionTargetName is an identifier used by the resulting governance service to determine how to use the associated element.
The governance service can optionally update the status of its processing of the action targets in the properties of each TargetForAction relationship. This is useful if there are many targets that will take a while to process and the organization wants to be able to monitor its progress. The attributes used to record progress are as follows:
- status is of type EngineActionStatus and records whether this action target has been processed or not (or what happened when processing was attempted).
- startDate identifies when processing started on the target entity.
- completionDate identifies when processing stopped for this target entity.
- completionMessage records a description of what happened during the processing.
EngineActionStatus enumeration¶
The EngineActionStatus indicates the execution status of the governance action.
| Enumeration | Value | Name | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| REQUESTED | 0 | Requested | The engine action has been created and is pending. |
| APPROVED | 1 | Approved | The engine action is approved to run. This means all of the manatory guards have been satisfied. |
| WAITING | 2 | Waiting | The engine action is waiting for its start time or the right conditions to run. |
| ACTIVATING | 3 | Activating | The governance service for the engine action is being initialized in the governance engine. |
| IN_PROGRESS | 4 | In Progress | The governance engine is running the associated governance service for the engine action. |
| ACTIONED | 10 | Actioned | The governance service for the engine action has successfully completed processing. |
| INVALID | 11 | Invalid | The governance engine has not been run because it is not appropriate (for example, a false positive). |
| IGNORED | 12 | Ignored | The governance action has not been run because a different governance action was chosen. |
| FAILED | 13 | Failed | The governance service for the engine action failed to execute. |
| CANCELLED | 14 | Cancelled | The engine action was cancelled by an external caller. |
| OTHER | 99 | Other | Undefined or unknown governance action status. |
EngineActionRequestSource relationship¶
The EngineActionRequestSource relationship links the first EngineAction entity in a process to the cause/originator of the action. This could be, for example, a governance action process, another engine action or a RequestForActionAnnotation linked to a discovery analysis report.
NextEngineAction relationship¶
The EngineAction entity is also linked to any follow-on activities through the NextEngineAction relationship, so it is possible to trace through a chain of actions. The guard describes the output guard produced by the previous action(s) that will trigger (or triggered) the next action(s).
If the guard is mandatory (ie mandatoryGuard = true), a next governance action can not run until a previous governance action has produced this guard.
Deprecated types
The following relationship types were deprecated in favour of attributes in the EngineAction to reduce the processing load in maintaining these relationships.
- EngineActionExecutor - Use executorEngineGUID, executorEngineName, requestType and requestParameters properties in EngineAction entity to identify the governance engine that will run the service that will execute the action. The specific service is identified by the requestType property. The governance engine is typically either a DiscoveryEngine or a EngineActionEngine.
- GovernanceActionProcessStepUse - Use processStepGUID, processStepName and processName properties in EngineAction entity to identify the engine action type (and any associated governance action process) that acted as a template when this engine action was initiated.
- GovernanceActionProcessStepGUID - Use processStepGUID attribute in the EngineAction entity to identify the governance action process step (and any associated governance action process) that acted as a template when this engine action was initiated.
- GovernanceActionProcessStepName - Use processStepName attribute in the EngineAction entity to identify the governance action process step (and any associated governance action process) that acted as a template when this engine action was initiated.
The ignoreMultipleTriggers attribute in the NextEngineAction has been deprecated.
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