New Action Builder for Lightning Forms and List Actions

New Action Builder for Lightning Forms and Lightning List Actions

We’ve recreated the Action Builder and the Expression Builder in Lightning Forms and Lightning List Actions to make building actions more intuitive and easier. Action buttons on the command bar for each SharePoint List form can be created using Lightning Forms, as well as actions to run upon form load events. The same action builder can be used within Lightning List Actions in order to run a series of actions on one or more selected items within a SharePoint list view from a command bar button.

What is the Action Builder?

There are many different actions that you can configure within SharePoint List forms or SharePoint List views such as Send Email, Update List Item, Show Message, Create Folder, and many more. You can configure many actions to run in a sequence. For example, if you wanted to create a “Submit Expense Form” button, rather than just Save and Close the form, your button could Save the form, send an email to your line manager informing them that you have submitted your expenses, update the Status field on the form to ‘Expenses Submitted’, and then close the form. Likewise, an ‘Approve Expense’ button could easily be created that would inform the expense claimant that the expenses are approved, and update the status field to ‘Approved’. Lightning List Actions could use the same buttons on the lists command bar that would allow for bulk approval of expenses across many selected SharePoint List items.

What was wrong with the old Action Builder?

Configuring the actions within Lightning Forms and Lightning List Actions has always been easy. However, there were some repetitive steps that could be time consuming, and ‘time consuming’ is not our thing here at Lightning Tools. Adding a condition for each action for when the action could run would sometimes need to be repeated for multiple actions. Not only would that become a bit repetitive, but it would also become confusing.

We’ve spent the best part of a year redeveloping the Action Builder! We have a completely new interface that allows you to drag and drop the actions into the sequence that they should run. You may also drag and drop conditional blocks to save repeating condition rules against each action.

The screenshot below shows the Action builder in the current version of Lightning Forms. Note the option of adding a condition to each action. Sometimes, that condition would be the same or similar for multiple actions in the sequence.

In the new Actions Builder (Shown Below), multiple actions can be dragged into a condition block. The conditions have an ‘If Yes’ and an ‘If No’ section. Therefore multiple actions can be dragged into the relevant sections to save you time.

Variables can also be used allowing you to calculate a value and then retrieve it multiple times.

To see the new Action Builder, sign up for our webinar which takes place on the 13th January 2022 at 4 pm GMT. If you cannot attend, we’ll prioritize sending you the recording.