Action Tracker Plugin

This plugin provides support for tracking actions embedded in meeting minutes. As you write the minutes during the meeting, you simply enter the actions into the text and as soon as the topic is saved, the actions "go live".

WARNING: TWiki-4 and later only. If you want to use this plugin with an earlier version of TWiki, you can try the old version from http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/viewfile/Plugins/ActionTrackerPlugin?rev=1.22;filename=ActionTrackerPlugin.zip

Actions are nicely formatted for display, and automatic notification of actions is supported using 'cron'. The action tracker can also be used for private reminders, for example TODO lists and diary entries, and has been successfully applied to functions as diverse as risk management and bug tracking.

( Discussion in TWiki:Plugins/ActionTrackerPluginDev )

Features

• Actions may be embedded in TWiki topics.
• Actions can be listed using searches.
• A script is provided for automatic action notification.
• Actions can be assigned to individuals, or to predefined groups of individuals.
• Fully configurable.

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Syntax Rules

Actions

Write the command %ACTION{ attributes }% anywhere in a TWiki topic. All the text following the final % up to the next end-of-line is taken as the action description. Standard attributes are

Name	Value	Description	Auto-completed
who	See People	The person or team responsible for completing the action.	current user
due	See Date Formats	The due date	today
state	open or closed	Set to open if the action is still open; set to closed if the action is closed. To extend the state set, see Non-standard attributes.	open
notify	See People	wikinames, or e-mail addresses, of people to notify when the action changes. See Notification for details on action notification.
creator	See People	Who created the action.	current user
created	See Date Formats	Date the action was created.	today
closer	See People	Who closed the action.	if (and only if) state="closed", current user
closed	See Date Formats	Date the action was closed, if ever.	if (and only if) state="closed", today
uid	6 digit number	Unique ID of the action. See UIDs.	calculated

For example,

%ACTION{ who="TWikiGuest" due="2 Jan 2004" state="open" notify="AttillaTheHun" }% An action for TWikiGuest

If the action description doesn't all fit on one line you can use shell-style here-document syntax to grab the next few lines. For example,

%ACTION{ who="LittleOysters" due="2 Jan 1884" state="open" }% <<EOF
The time has come, the walrus said,
To speak of many things.
Of shoes, and ships, and sealing wax,
Of cabbages and kings.
EOF

The delimiter must be a sequence of alphanumeric characters, and the closing delimiter must be on a line of its own.

The fields with an entry in the 'Auto-completed' column are automatically filled in, if they are missing, whenever someone saves the topic containing the action. The default values are as indicated in the table. You can override this behaviour by providing values for any of these attributes when you type the action. Note: you are not recommended to provide a value for the uid (see UIDs) field!

Action searches

Write the command %ACTIONSEARCH{ attributes }% anywhere in a TWiki topic. Standard attributes are

Name	Value	Description
who	See People	Person responsible for closing the action.
notify	See People	Persons who want to be notified of a change
state	late, or any legal state value	Set to late to search for late actions; set to any any legal state value to search for actions in that state. See Settings for details on how to extend the state set.
within	a number of days	Search for actions that are within a number of days of their due date. Usually used in conjunction with other attributes, such as state="open". Works in both directions, so you can use this to search for actions which are going to fall due within a certain number of days, or a negative number for actions that fell due between a time in the past and now.
web	Perl regular expression	A regular expression that matches the names of all the webs to search. If this attribute is omitted, the default is to search only the current web. Searching many webs is much slower, especially in a large installation. Webs marked NOSEARCHALL will not be searched.
topic	Perl regular expression	A regular expression that matches the names of all the topics to search. If this attribute is omitted, the default is to search all the topics in the selected webs.
due	Absolute or relative date expression. See Date Formats	Due date for the action.
creator	See People	Who created the action.
created	Absolute or relative date expression. See Date Formats	Date the action was created.
closed	Absolute or relative date expression. See Date Formats	Date the action was closed, if ever.
closer	See People	Who closed the action.
uid	6 digit number	Unique ID of the action.
format	Presentation format	See Formatting tables
header	Presentation format	See Formatting tables
orient	Presentation format	See Formatting tables
sort	Comma-separated list of field names	Fields to sort the matched actions by. For example, sort="$who,$due" will sort by who first and then due. This field is optional; by default the table will be sorted by due date.

For example,

%ACTIONSEARCH{ who="me" state="late" }%
%ACTIONSEARCH{ who="me" open late }%
%ACTIONSEARCH{ who="TWikiGuest" state="open" within="7" }%
%ACTIONSEARCH{ web=".*" who="Genghis.Khan@mongol.empire.org" state="open" within="7" }%

When you are searching for fields containing dates (such as closed, created and due) you can prepend one of the conditions >, <, >= and <= to the date. For example, closed=">1-Jan-1999" will match all actions that have been closed at any time since 1-Jan-1999, and created=">= 1-Jan-2000" will match all actions created this century. You can also specify dates relative to the current date and time. See Date Formats for details of how to specify relative dates. For example,

%ACTIONSEARCH{ state="closed" closed="> 7 days ago"}%

will search for all actions closed in the last 7 days.

Date formats

Absolute date formats

Absolute dates are required in action specifications. Date formats must be as recognised by Time::ParseDate. The following absolute date formats are recognised. Dates containing spaces must be enclosed in double-quotes.

• Dow, dd Month yy
• Dow, dd Month yyyy
• Dow, dd Month
• dd Month yy
• dd Month yyyy
• Month day{st,nd,rd,th}, year
• Month dd yyyy
• yyyy/mm/dd
• yyyy/mm
• mm/dd/yy
• mm/dd/yyyy
• mm/yy
• yy/mm (only if year > 12)
• yy/mm/dd (only if year > 12 and day < 32)

You are strongly recommended never to use the 'mm/dd/yyyy or mm/dd/yyyy' formats, to avoid confusing users in Europe (like me). Note that due to limitations in the Time::Parsedate module, dates before 1970 will not work as expected.

Relative date formats

When you are searching for fields containing dates (such as closed, created and due) you can specify dates relative to the current date and time. For example:

Syntax	Example	Notes
Dow after next	Tuesday after next
Dow	Tuesday	last Tuesday
next Dow	next Thursday
tomorrow	tomorrow
today	today
yesterday	yesterday
last dow	last wednesday
last week	last week	7 days ago
now	now
now + count units	now + 2 years
now - count units	now - 3 weeks
+ count units	+ 31 days
- count units	- 2 months
count units ago	10 days ago

Valid units are minutes, hours, days, weeks, years.

People

People are identified to the action tracker using a wikiname (e.g. People.WilliamWallace or simply WilliamWallace) or an e-mail address (e.g. a_einstein@pto.co.ch). The e-mail address is useful if you want to notify people who aren't registered in the wiki, but bear in mind that if they are outside your firewall, they'll get action notifications but the chances are they won't be able to edit pages and close actions. Very annoying!

E-mail addresses of people are found by the process described below.

You can also use the shorthand me for the currently logged-in user (this is TWikiGuest unless you have been prompted for a username and password). In actions, this will automatically be expanded when the topic is saved, and in searches it will match the currently logged in user.

Groups

You can assign an action to a group defined using a TWiki group topic (see TWikiDocumentation). Alternatively you can give a list of people as the value of the attribute. For example,

%ACTION{who=TWikiAdminGroup ...}%
%ACTION{who="KnutHaraldsen,MagnusMagnusson" ...}%

Note in general you should not use these mechanisms for assigning actions, because the actions so created are not specific. Actions should be assigned to one person only, so that it's clear who is responsible for them.

UIDs

For administrators only: Each action is assigned a Unique Identifier (UID) when it is created. This UID is a six-digit number, and is generated when the action is first saved by incrementing a number in a special file (pub/_work_areas/ActionTrackerPlugin/UIDRegister under the TWiki installation). If this file is accidentally deleted, or is not writable, then you will have problems and you may get duplicate UIDs. Normally this won't matter a hoot, as UIDs only have to be unique within a single topic, but if the file is persistantly inaccessible it could be a bit of a nuisance.

Notification

ActionTrackerPlugin comes with a notifier script, like the mailnotify script used for WebNotify (see MonitoringSiteActivity^? for more information on setting up mailnotify). This script allows you to:

• examine all the actions in all webs (except those specified NOSEARCHALL) and notify owners of the state of actions,
• find actions that have changed state, and notify people who have registered an interest in that action.

The frequency with which actions are notified depends on how you set up your cron (or equivalent) jobs on the server.

The actionnotify script interprets its parameters as a search expression of the same type as that used in %ACTIONSEARCH%. All actions which match that expression will be notified to their owners.

Note that the actionnotify script must be run from the bin directory. This is so it can pick up the TWiki path configuration file, setlib.cfg.

For example, you could set up the cron jobs as follows:

0 * * * * cd /home/twiki/bin && ../tools/actionnotify "state=\"late\""
0 8,16 * * * cd /home/twiki/bin && ../tools/actionnotify "state=\"open\" within=\"3\""
0 0 * * * cd /home/twiki/bin && ../tools/actionnotify "state=\"open\" within=\"7\"
0 0 * * 1 cd /home/twiki/bin && ../tools/actionnotify "state=\"open\" within=\"30\"

(If you don't know cron, the first 5 fields are minute, hour, day of month, month and day of week. * means 'every'). This crontab will notify actions according to the schedule:

1. Actions that are late will be notified every hour, on the hour
2. Actions that are still open within three days of their due date will be notified twice a day, at 8am and 4pm
3. Actions that are still open within seven days of their due date will be notified once a day, at midnight.
4. Actions that are still open within thirty days of their due date will be notified once a week, at midnight on monday.

A rather aggressive schedule!

Note: At Wind River they notify folks three times a week on Mon, Wed and Fri for open action items due within 8 days. Crontab entry for geeks:

0 0 * * 1,3,5 (cd .../bin; ../tools/actionnotify state=open within=8 'web=[CEIMPSW].*' > .../logs/actionnotify.txt 2>&1)

You can configure the fields which are scanned to detect state changes; see Settings.

Translating names to e-mail addresses

The wikiname of the user to be notified is translated to a mail address according to the following rules:

• If the user has a personal page, and that personal page contains a line or lines matching
  spaces * Email: email address
  or
  spaces * E-mail: email address
  Alternatively if the topic is a group definition (the name ends in 'Group') then the line
  spaces * Set GROUP =
  is used to determine the wikinames of the people in the group. These are resolved to email addresses recursively. If that fails,
• If they appear in any WebNotify in any web, in the form of a line that gives an email address, then that address is used.
• If this fails and the 'who' name is a valid e-mail address, for example person@domain.co.uk, then that name is used.

Note: If a name cannot be translated to an e-mail address using the mechanisms described above, a warning will be output to data/warning.txt..

The actionnotify script is also used to notify users who have registered an interest in being notified when an action changes. This function of the script is activated when you use the changedsince parameter. changedsince is used to specify the time period within which changed actions are interesting. Any action which has changed in the given period will be notified to all users who have registered an interest in that action using notify. The changedsince value is a relative date string, which uses the following formats

• yesterday
• last dow
• last week
• now - count units
• - count units
• count units ago

where units may be minutes, days, hours, weeks, months or even years. count is just an integer. dow is the name of a day of the week. For example:

changedsince="last monday"
changedsince="now - 3 days"
changedsince="- 36 hours"
changedsince="3 days ago"

Obviously you have to be careful to synchronise your changedsince expression with the activation of your cron job. The ideal is to specify the same delta as the gap between cron activations. For example,

0 0 * * * cd /home/twiki/bin && ../tools/actionnotify 'web="News" changedsince="yesterday"'

will notify registered users of action changes that occurred in the last 24 hours. Note the use of single quotes to prevent expansion in the shell.

Notes:

1. Not all action changes get notified, only changes to certain sensitive fields. You can change the set of fields that are sensitive to changes by setting the NOTIFYCHANGES parameter, as described in Settings, below.
2. Unlike all other search terms, changedsince works as an OR term rather than an AND term. If you use a compound expression like late,changedsince=yesterday, this will not give you all late actions that changed since yesterday. Instead, it will give you all late actions and all actions that changed since yesterday.
3. If you give the parameter DEBUG to the actionnotify script, it will print out the mails that would have been sent to STDOUT. This is useful for debugging, and may be useful if you have some other processing in mind (such as piping to an alternative mail program).
4. changedsince requires RCS, and will not work with RcsLite.

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Customisation

Formatting search tables

The header, format and orient parameters of %ACTIONSEARCH{}% support formatting of the action table using a similar syntax to that described in FormattedSearch. For example:

%ACTIONSEARCH{ web="Directors" state="open" format="|$who|$text|$edit|" header="|Director|Films||" orient="rows" }%

Name:	Expands To:
$who	Who is responsible for the action
$due	When the action is due
$state	Current state of the action (see also note below)
$notify	Who to notify when the action state changes
$closed	When the action was closed, and who closed it
$creator	Who created the action
$created	When the action was created
$edit	A link to the action editor for this action
$uid	Unique identifier for the action
$web	Name of the web containing the action
$topic	Topic name containing the action
$text	Formatted action text
$n or $n()	New line
$nop or $nop()	Is a "no operation". This variable gets removed.
$quot	Double quote (").
$percnt	Percent sign (%)
$dollar	Dollar sign ($)

A default format for actions and action search results can be defined in this topic or the WebPreferences topic of the current web. See Settings for more details.

Non-standard Attributes

As well as the standard attributes you can add non-standard attributes to actions, and use them in searches. For example:

%ACTION{ who="EmperorHadrian" due="1 Jan 0053" state="closed" legion="7th" cohort="6th" maniple="3rd" }% Build a wall to keep the Scots out of England

Non-standard attributes must be lower-case words. The following names may not be used for non-standard attributes: closed, closer, created, creator, dollar, due, edit, format, header, late, n, nop, notify, percnt, quot, sort, state, text, topic, uid, web, who, within.

To define non-standard attributes you need to set the value of EXTRAS in this topic (or to the WebPreferences topic of each web) - see Settings below. All attributes must be given a type, which is used by the formatter, the search engine and the action editor. For example,

	* Set EXTRAS = |plaintiffs,names,16|decision,text,16|sentencing,date|sentence,select,"life","5 years","community service"|

The following types are supported:

Type	Format	Description
select	select, size, "option 1", "option 2", ...	Can take one of the string values option1, option2,.... etc.
names	names, size	One or more wikinames or e-mail addresses.
text	text, size	An arbitrary text field
date	date, size	A date in one of the formats described above. See Date Formats

In the above, size is a single number, which is the width (in characters) of the text box in the action editor for text, names and date, and the number of options to show in select..

Note that there is one exception to the "no redefinition" rule above; the state attribute can be extended to take extra states. However if you want the closure functionality (closed, closer, and late actions) to work, the closed state must be retained. To extend the set of states, simply include a definition of state in the EXTRAS definition:

	* Set EXTRAS = |state,select,1,"open","fried","boiled","poached","closed"|

Searching for non-standard attributes

You can of course search for values of non-standard attributes. For example:

%ACTIONSEARCH{ sentence="life" }%

If a non-standard attribute is declared as type text you can use perl regular expressions in the search. Searches for values of type names will match any-to-any. For example,

%ACTIONSEARCH{ car="VolkswagenBeetle,MercedesCoupe" }%

will match both of the following actions:

%ACTION{ car="VolkswagenBeetle,AudiSport" ... }%
%ACTION{ car="ToyotaSupra,MercedesCoupe,ColtLancer" ... }%

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ActionTrackerPlugin Settings

These settings can be overridden in the WebPreferences topic of the current web, or individually in topics (by defining ACTIONTRACKERPLUGIN_TABLEHEADER or ACTIONTRACKERPLUGIN_TABLEFORMAT etc).

• The format of an action output. The following fields can be output: web, topic, text, who, due, notify, uid, creator, state, edit, and any EXTRAS you may have. These settings can be overridden in an ACTIONSEARCH command using the format and header attributes. TABLEHEADER defines the column headings, TABLEFORMAT defines the contents of the columns, and if TABLEORIENT is set to "rows", action tables will be aligned as rows of values instead of the default columns of values.
  • Set TABLEHEADER = | Assigned to | Due date | Description | State | Notify ||
  • Set TABLEFORMAT = | $who | $due | $text | $state | $notify | $edit |
  • Set TABLEORIENT = cols

• The alternative text format of an action, as seen by a mail recipient who doesn't accept HTML in mail. Used when mailing action or change notifications.
  • Set TEXTFORMAT = Action for $who, due $due, $state$n$text$n

• Full URL of the CSS to use in formatting actions.
• Set CSS = http://wiki.cis.rit.edu/pub/TWiki/ActionTrackerPlugin/styles.css

• The format of the fields in the action editor. You can also set EDITBOXWIDTH and EDITBOXHEIGHT to override the defaults (which are 70x22) just for the action editor.
  • Set EDITHEADER = | Assigned to | Due date | State | Notify |
  • Set EDITFORMAT = | $who | $due | $state | $notify |
  • Set EDITORIENT = cols

• If set to 1 will edit an action in a separate browser window (requires JavaScript)
  • Set USENEWWINDOW = 1

• If set to 1, action edits will offer a 'Save Changes' instead of the usual 'Preview Changes' button. If this is set along with the USENEWWINDOW parameter, the subwindow should close on save, but it won't because I haven't worked out how to do this safely in JavaScript.
  • Set NOPREVIEW = 1

• The fields to scan to detect changes for actionnotify. Changes in other fields are ignored.
  • Set NOTIFYCHANGES = $who,$due,$state,$text

• Non-standard attributes - see Non-standard attributes above.
  • Set EXTRAS =

• Set to 1 to enable debug features, including the undocumented %ACTIONNOTIFICATIONS{}% and %ACTIONTRACKERPREFS% features.
  • Set DEBUG = 0

---

Plugin Installation Instructions

You do not need to install anything in the browser to use this extension. The following instructions are for the administrator who installs the extension on the server where TWiki is running.

Like many other TWiki extensions, this module is shipped with a fully automatic installer script written using the BuildContrib.

• If you have TWiki 4.1 or later, and Perl 5.8, you can install from the configure interface (Go to Plugins->Find More Extensions)
  • The webserver user has to have permission to write to all areas of your installation for this to work.
• If you have a permanent connection to the internet (and Perl 5.8), you are recommended to use the automatic installer script
  • Just download the ActionTrackerPlugin_installer perl script and run it.
• Notes:
  • The installer script will:
    • Automatically resolve dependencies,
    • Copy files into the right places in your local install (even if you have renamed data directories),
    • check in new versions of any installed files that have existing RCS histories files in your existing install (such as topics).
    • If the $TWIKI_PACKAGES environment variable is set to point to a directory, the installer will try to get archives from there. Otherwise it will try to download from twiki.org or cpan.org, as appropriate.
    • (Developers only: the script will look for twikiplugins/ActionTrackerPlugin/ActionTrackerPlugin.tgz before downloading from TWiki.org)
  • If you don't have a permanent connection, you can still use the automatic installer, by downloading all required TWiki archives to a local directory.
    • Point the environment variable $TWIKI_PACKAGES to this directory, and the installer script will look there first for required TWiki packages.
      • $TWIKI_PACKAGES is actually a path; you can list several directories separated by :
    • If you are behind a firewall that blocks access to CPAN, you can build a local CPAN mini-mirror, as described at http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Codev/BuildingDakar#CPAN_local_minimirror
• If you don't want to use the installer script, or have problems on your platform (e.g. you don't have Perl 5.8), then you can still install manually:
  1. Download and unpack one of the .zip or .tgz archives to a temporary directory.
  2. Manually copy the contents across to the relevant places in your TWiki installation.
  3. Check in any installed files that have existing ,v files in your existing install (take care not to lock the files when you check in)
  4. Manually edit LocalSite.cfg to set any configuration variables.
  5. Run configure and enable the module, if it is a plugin.
  6. Repeat from step 1 for any missing dependencies.

• If the plugin is installed and enabled correctly you should see a formatted action below:

Assigned to	Due date	Description	State	Notify
TWikiGuest	Wed, 1 Jan 2003	Example action	open		edit

• ... and the result of a formatted search below:

Who	TWikiGuest
Due	Wed, 1 Jan 2003
State	open
Description	Example action (go to action)

Upgrade notes

Earlier versions of this plugin installed a number of files that are no longer required. Relative to the root of the TWiki installation these are:

File	What's happened
data/Plugins/ActionTrackerPlugin.txt	Moved to data/TWiki
templates/actionchangenotify.tmpl	Merged with actionnotify.tmpl
bin/editaction	Merged into plugin code, using hooks added in Feb 2003 TWiki release
bin/previewaction	Merged into plugin code, using hooks added in Feb 2003 TWiki release

The mechanism for defining notification groups as lists of "Email" lines in a topic in Main is no longer supported. Please upgrade to the mechanism described herein.

Plugin Info

Plugin Author:	TWiki:Main/CrawfordCurrie, http://c-dot.co.uk
Plugin Version:	12652
Change History:
12652	Fixes for Item3446, Item2127. Updates to tests and templates for recent core changes.
11556	QBE topic made much friendlier using TWiki-4 features; minor bugfixes
10919	Item2606 actionnotify can now read email addresses from password manager as well as new TWiki4 style user topics. actionnotify requires TWiki-4.0.4 + hotfix-4.0.4-1
8385	Item1443 style sheet bug makes yellow warning not show
8372	Item1434 moved actionnotify from bin into tools
8304	Item1305 removing dotted style from AT. Looks horrible in IE
8090	Item1304 removed unnecessary warning that may be breaking some sites
8089	Item1305 changed dotted to solid gray, as requested
26 Mar 2005	2.022 Corrected JSCalendar problems, and cleaned up lazy-loading of libraries. Added relative date specs to searches.
8 Feb 2005	2.021 Documentation fixes.
19 Nov 2004	2.020 Added conditions for date matching, and fixed config so that tests pass again.
13 Oct 2004	2.013 If a user cuts and pastes an action with a uid in it, the action editor would get confused. This update ensures all action UIDs are unique within a topic when it is saved.
16 Aug 2004	2.012 Dependency automation and Cairo readiness, further change to within behaviour (bidirectionality)
3 Feb 2004	Fixes for internationalisation, name matching, QBE, within= behaviour, documentation.
21 May 2003	Non-standard fields. Configurability of tables and action editor. Non-standard attributes. Eliminated chdir. Multi-line actions. Optimisation of notifies.
30 Apr 2003	Version 2.0; Large sections rewritten to take advantage of improvements in Plugin support, eliminating two scripts in bin. Added UIDs and formattable action searches
30 Jan 2003	Query-by-example action search with notify field; notification of change emails and actions email are sent as one; notify field was added to topic view and edit; various bug fixes by TWiki:Main/PaulineCheung
26 Sep 2002	Added changedsince notify support, added support for editing in a seperate window, incorporated attribute syntax corrections contributed by PeterThoeny?, sorted ACTIONSEARCH output and action notifications
14 Feb 2002	Sorted ACTIONSEARCH results by due date; Fixed bugs editaction kills form data, Actions flagged as late the day before, TWiki table and bullet formatting doesn't work within action text
11 Jan 2002	Added ACTIONSEARCH for selected webs and topics; Changed action editor to use a template; Eliminated UNIX dependencies; Fixed formatting of actions in bulleted lists
9 Jan 2002	Bugfix version
Perl Version:	5.8
Plugin Home:	http://TWiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Plugins/ActionTrackerPlugin
Feedback:	http://TWiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Plugins/ActionTrackerPluginDev

Related Topics: TWikiPreferences, TWikiPlugins

Further development

Further development of this code is welcomed. It is recommended that you unpack the distribution into a development directory and use the supplied build file which provides targets to run the test suite, and install and uninstall your development code into a test installation. Please, please, please run, and extend if necessary, the test set!

Developer discussion is in TWiki:Plugins/ActionTrackerPluginDev.

Copyright

This code is an original development of Motorola Inc. and is protected by the following copyrights:

• Copyright © 2002-2003 Motorola. All Rights Reserved.
• Portions Copyright © 2004,2005 Crawford Currie, http://c-dot.co.uk

License

As required for the publication of all extensions to TWiki, this software is published under the terms of the GNU General Public License.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details, published at http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html

-- TWiki:Main/CrawfordCurrie - 13:09:25 30 January 2007