Business Actions are things that can happen inside the application. They enhance the vtiger CRM link system and they can affect any part of the application.

They are shown/applied depending on the field permission values set on each record which may include conditional business maps.

By default, each action will be applied to all modules. We can make an action apply only on certain modules using the Only On My Module checkbox combined with the desired modules being selected in the Modules select box.

The permission system will permit us to:

• mark an action as Active or not
• make the action available for all users
• if not marked as available for all users, first we will search if the action is assigned to the current user and then if the current user belongs to a role selected on the action
• finally, for all actions that apply we check if the action has a business rule. If it does we evaluate the rule which must return “true” for the action to be accepted. This permits us to show actions only when some conditions are met.

They can be retrieved via the getBusinessActions web service method.

Developer Blocks are a very powerful way of adding custom functionality into coreBOS. With them, we can easily create all sorts of scripts with any functionality we need, but sometimes we just want to launch a script or method and get a result message back on screen. To accomplish this we can create a business action that calls runBAScript. This function accepts a URI to call and expects one of three responses:

• %MSG% followed by a message that will be shown in the inline message box of the application.
• %FUNCTION%funcname%PARAMS%onefunctionparameter which will execute the named function if it exists
• anything else will be shown as an alert message box

For example, if we create a script named write2log.php inside the Accounts module we could create this Business Action:

javascript:runBAScript('index.php?module=Accounts&action=AccountsAjax&file=write2log')

and write2log.php could be:

<?php
require_once 'vtlib/Vtiger/Module.php';
require_once 'Smarty_setup.php';
global $log;
$log->fatal('write '.$_REQUEST['__module'].' - '.$_REQUEST['__crmid']);
$smarty = new vtigerCRM_Smarty();
$smarty->assign('ERROR_MESSAGE', 'write '.$_REQUEST['__module'].' - '.$_REQUEST['__crmid']);
echo '%%%MSG%%%'.$smarty->fetch('applicationmessage.tpl');

As can be seen in the previous script the URI called will always receive two additional parameters:

• __module the current module
• __crmid the current crmid if it exists (detail view)

In order to make it even easier to add functionality inside coreBOS with business actions, you can also launch a workflow from one. This opens the possibilities enormously as almost anything that can be done from a workflow can be done from a business action link.

javascript:runBAWorkflow(workflowid, crmid)

The crmid parameter can be:

• a unique CRMID
• a string with the word “RECORD” which will load the current record if available
• a string with a list of CRMIDs separated by semi-colon ';'

Note that if either the workflowid or the crmid are empty nothing will be done.

See the Developers Blocks section for more examples.