Triggers and
Actions depend upon the idea that a change in the Xinet database or an
Event within the
File System has the power to initiate an
Action (or series of
Actions), such as transferring a file, printing a file, etc. This provides a flexible and powerful opportunity to build many specific workflows. The following provides an overview of
Date and
Value Triggers and
Actions. 
As is briefly covered in Trigger Set Configuration, there are three types of triggers: file
Event Triggers, Date Triggers and
Value Triggers.
A File Event Trigger runs
Actions upon changes to a file inside an
Active Path. The changes, which all effect a file’s history, include downloading a high-resolution version of the file, downloading an FPO version of a file, uploading a new file, downloading a Custom Image Order, or moving a file into a watched path. You can tie any of these changes, as long as they occur within an
Active Path, to a
Trigger Set with specified
Actions.
Date Triggers and
Value Triggers differ, in that a change in value of some piece of metadata must occur. Though the mechanism for activating these two trigger types is slightly different, both require that a specific condition be satisfied to execute actions.
Date Triggers meet their conditions when the current time reaches the period specified within the
Action, for example “30 minutes before the value of a date field.”
Value Triggers meet conditions through changes to values within data fields. With each change to a database value via Xinet, these changes are verified against the configured
Trigger Sets. First, Xinet checks whether any
Trigger Sets are active for the file-system path for the changed file. If Xinet finds that there is a
Trigger Set corresponding to the file-system path, it then compares the change that occurred to any that might initiate actions in that
Trigger Set. Then, if there is a
Trigger Rule that should be initiated by the value change, Xinet executes in sequential order the
Actions associated with that
Trigger Rule.
Date Triggers also test whether any
Rules should invoke
Actions whenever values of date fields are set. However, any
Actions that should be run some time in the future (when the correct time is reached) are added to a list in the database to be executed at the correct time. When the condition is met (the time arrives), Xinet executes the
Trigger Rule Actions.
Xinet executes Actions using some information from the environment; it may provide other information using “arguments.” Both standard arguments, discussed below, and custom arguments are possible. Please note that custom arguments must always be named
arg0, arg1, arg2 and so on. These are the only legal names for custom arguments to be used with
Actions. Any other argument names will be ignored.
The following example shows how you might execute the copy Action with arguments. These should be typed on a single line.
Overview of how