Actions

An action is a small unit of work that Dalet Flex carries out on your behalf.

Examples of action types are:

  • Ingest: Ingesting a media file.
  • Transcode: Converting a media clip from one format to another.
  • Publish: Publishing your media to the appropriate platform.

An action type is an abstract term and relies on actions (plugins) to implement specific work. For example, the Publish action type states that we are planning to publish some content to a remote platform. However, it doesn’t specify which platform or how the content will be processed and delivered to a platform. This is where the action or plugin comes in. An action is a specific implementation of an action type.

The Publish action can have the following actions:

  • Publish to YouTube
  • Publish to Daily Motion

Differences between Action and Plugin

An action is also a type of Dalet Flex plugin, we can use the word action and plugin interchangeably. Plugins help developers to extend the functionality of Dalet Flex in a simple, modular way. New plugins can be created using Flex API. So if, for example, a new internet TV service (let’s call it “New TV”) is launched, a developer could create a new plugin with the action type of Publish, and then deploy it to Dalet Flex.

A typical instance of Dalet Flex will have a default action for each action type. The default plugins are highly configurable to support lots of different scenarios. When the default action does not deliver the functionality you need, for example publishing a video to YouTube, then you would utilize a more specialised action.

Action Object Properties

Property Support Explanation
Scope Account The scoping of this object
Visibility Whether the object supports visibility
Plugins Supports plugins
Extended Config. Whether the object has an extended configuration tab
Scripting Whether the object can be configured using scripting
Enable / Disable Whether the object can be enabled and disabled
Start / Stop Whether the object can be started and stopped
Copy Whether the object can be copied
Export / Import Whether the object can be exported and imported
Delete Whether the object can be deleted
Unique Name Whether the object name must be unique within its scope