Triggers & Actions
Check out the Automated Image Tagging walkthrough for more insights into Triggers and Actions.
Triggers
By some manner or another, triggers are events that produce clips matching some criteria for that specific type of trigger.
Below you will find basic summaries of the triggers currently available.
| Name | Description |
|---|---|
| Clip Added | Triggered when a clip of the selected type is added to the system in any way (clipboard, drag-and-drop, analyzer generated or duplicated). |
| Clip Tagged | Triggered when a clip is linked to the specified Tag Collection. |
| Folder Watcher | Triggered when the selected folder's content changes. The output will be a new or existing (when the Ignore Duplicates preference is enabled) File Clip of the file or folder that has changed along with the type of change as its last output. |
| Monkey Copy | Like a Shortcut Trigger but when the key combination is pressed, a 'Copy' event will be simulated in the active application so it still works like copy but then the chain of actions attached to the Monkey Copy Trigger will get executed in the background using the simulated copy clipboard data (see tips below for more info). |
| Shortcut | Triggered by a global shortcut you define. If MonkeyPaste is active it will attempt to use the selected clip (if there is one) as input. Otherwise it will try to use the clipboard as its input. Note: a Shortcut Trigger will still execute if there is no input to keep it flexible (so it can be a macro trigger etc.) since its not a data-driven event. |
If you hooked up some text translation analyzer->Set Clipboard action chain to a Monkey Copy Trigger then with one key it will copy some text you select, translate it then put the translation on the clipboard to paste where you need it.
Let's say you have a 'Dessert Receipes' Tag Collection and you find a new receipe you like online. If you had a special 'Dessert Receipe' Monkey Copy Trigger shortcut you could just select the receipe text and type the shortcut then automatically add it to your 'Dessert Receipes' Tag Collection (by hooking a Classify action up to the Monkey Copy Trigger).
Actions
Actions always have one input and some number of outputs where it performs its action on the input and then passes the result to its children as its output.
| Name | Description |
|---|---|
| Alert | General purpose sound and/or system tray message alerts. Alert action's have no affect on their input. |
| Analyzer | Processes its input clip using the assigned Analyzer Preset. |
| Application Command | Invokes the assigned application action. All Application Command's are stateless and their input clip is ignored. |
| Classify | Links its input clip to the assigned Tag Collection. |
| Conditional | Performs a text comparision on the input clip or previous action output. When comparision fails (its not a match) no child actions will be executed. So it acts like a logical gate. |
| Delay | (Experimental) Primarily used in conjunction with the Repeater Action for polling remote sources or aid with long running operations. |
| File Writer | Saves input to the selected folder. |
| Repeater | (Experimental) Used for creating action loops or repetive tasks. When repeated, it will execute all children again with its original input. When using an interval without a repeat count, the trigger will need to be disabled and reenabled to halt the repeating. Can be useful for polling or web scraping automation. |
| Set Clipboard | Sets the clipboard to the input clip. |
There are no restrictions or any scheduling system in place for action chains (yet) and if you branch your chain (adding more than one child action to an action) you may get inconsistent results. After a branch there's no telling when some action will modify an input or any guarentees that some processing has completed on another branch.
Last Output
Some actions add data to the chain of execution which is referred to as Last Output.
Last output can be a new clip like from the Qr Coder Plugin which generates a QR code based on its source clip or Last Output can be some type of annotation about its parent action's output which is the case for the Image Annotator Plugin that outputs formatted information about the objects that it detected.
Designer Shapes
The shapes for triggers and actions can help you understand how they work.
- Triggers are circles and only have input from a trigger event.
- Condtional actions are diamonds and their condition must evaluate to true for their child actions to continue.
- All other actions are squares and will always pass their input (with the result of their action) as output to their child actions.