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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.

UML

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. The governance service can update the status of its processing of the action targets in the properties of each TargetForAction relationship.

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.

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.

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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