Tommy Actions System
Tommy Actions is an IFTTT based system that uses the following object: Tasks , Triggers , Conditions , and Activities .
Each mini program may define a number of Actions that can be used to run dynamic code and perform arbitrary tasks that update the interface in real-time
Tasks
Tasks run a block of code at scheduled intervals and fire a Trigger when data is available or an internal condition is met. The code executed by tasks is completely implementation independent, but the data output by the script must be in a format that Tommy understands so the Actions system can execute the correct Trigger.
Triggers
Triggers are executed by a Task and passed into the Actions system to be processed by an Activity
Conditions
Conditions are optional processors that check the Trigger data to determine if an Activity can be run. Conditions use conditional operators such as greater_than, less_than, or equal_to to process Trigger data.
Activities
Activities handle Trigger data and do something with it. This may include sending an email, notifying a user, or just about anything you could imagine with our internal or external third party APIs.
Defining an Action
The easiest way to learn how to define an action is to reverse engineer what’s already been built. Take for example the Poke mini program which defines an action that runs a Task (poke.tasks.default), a Trigger (poke.triggers.default) and an Activity (_chat.activities.send_message_).
actions:
poke_to_message:
title: "Poke chat message"
description: "Send a poke message to users at scheduled intervals."
task: "poke.tasks.default"
trigger: "poke.triggers.default"
activity: "chat.activities.send_message"
mappings:
message:
title: "Message text"
type: "variable"
value: "trigger.message"
timer:
cron: "0 9 * * *"
dependencies:
chat: "1.0"
So what is actually going on here? It’s pretty straight forward once you understand the syntax.
The timer parameter tells the actions system to run the specified task at every day at 9am.
In our case the task being run is poke.tasks.default, whose only function is to fire the poke.triggers.default trigger. Both of these tasks and triggers are defined in the manifest.yml file, the full contents of which can be seen within the SDK.
Our action definition specifies chat.activities.send_message as the activity to be run when the poke.triggers.default trigger is fired. As you may have guessed from the chat. prefix on the activity parameter, the chat.activities.send_message activity is actually defined externally in Tommy chat, and the sole purpose of the activity is to send a chat message when run. This is how you reference an external addon’s tasks, triggers and activities when programming your own mini programs. Note that if you reference external items, then you must add them to the dependency list.
The other very important thing to mention is the mappings parameter. This describes how the activity will consume the trigger data. If our case the trigger just takes a simple message parameter, and our trigger also outputs a message param, so all we doing is mapping the trigger’s message param with the activity.