[discuss][uiActions] How to force specific action execution?

[Dosant]

Assuming we have:

• Trigger1,
• ActionA attached to Trigger1
• ActionB attached to Trigger1

When app executes Trigger1, context menu popup is shown and user has to pick either ActionA or ActionB.
But assume for some cases app knows it wants to execute ActionA

What is the best way to implement this?

Some options I thought of:

1. just execute Action1 directly without using a trigger? (is it a hack and uiActions shouldn't be used like this? Or is this fine?)
2. Implement more specific trigger: "Trigger2" and attach only ActionA to it. Execute Trigger2
3. Introduce concept of "default" action and allow to specify during trigger execution uiActions.exec(Trigger1, {useDefaultAction: true}), where it knowns default is ActionA

Probably related to #47468?

@streamich, @ppisljar, @stacey-gammon what is your take on it?

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Real use case where this came up:

After adding nested triggers and actions I refactored explore underlying data to use Apply_filter_action. This enabled "explore underlying data" for Maps. Instead of disabling this functionality completely, I'd like to leave it. But there are advanced cases where this popup spoils the UX and, for now, I'd just like to not show that popup for some cases, but apply filter directly. (see Nathan's comment #71445 (comment))

But I am not sure what is the correct way to do it.

[elasticmachine]

Pinging @elastic/kibana-app-arch (Team:AppArch)

[ppisljar]

i think 1. is fine. 3. doesn't make sense, it results in 1.

so if app wants to execute specific action, execute that action.
the only reason you would fire a trigger is that app doesn't care what happens and leaves that decision to the admin/user/consumer.

however for the case of maps i am not sure that is the case ? what happens when you put map embeddable somewhere where there is no filter manager (and no action that would apply that filter) ? If its something inside the application itself that would be fine, but for something inside embeddable triggers should be used.

[Dosant]

@ppisljar, this specific case is about map embeddable.

In current scenario from inside map embeddable, depending on what exactly user did, I want to one of:

1. Either exec apply filter trigger and show all available options; or
2. Apply filter directly, because I don't want intermediate context menu to popup

---

What if in case of executing action directly we would first call isCompatible?

 if (action.isCompatible(context)) {
  action.exec(context)
} 

[ppisljar]

we discussed over zoom and decided to try option 3. as its not true it will result in option 1. there is one big difference, app running executeTriggerActions will not know which action will execute, just that the default one will, which still allows us to provide different action implementations in different apps (for example apply_filter_action will look different in apps without filter bar and not using filter manager)

[Dosant]

@ppisljar, @streamich please check how it might look if we just go with just execute Action1 directly without using a trigger. It seems like it is fine to call Apply_Filter action in that case, because it comes from embeddable plugin and not relies on global filter bar.

WDYT?

#73067

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for future more advanced cases we could get back and implement: #72673 (comment)

[Dosant]

I guess this can be closed for now. Maps implement this using approach similar to #73067.