User's Guide - Actions
Actions are specialized commands that your AutoPlay application can perform at run time. Each action is a discrete instruction that tells the application to do something—whether it's to hide an object, jump to another page, open an external document, or modify a Registry key.
Actions are always triggered by events. Events are just things that can happen while the AutoPlay application is running, such as the user clicking on a Text Object, or the end of an MPEG video being reached. Every event in AutoPlay has its own list of actions, known as the action list for that event. Whenever an event is triggered, all of the actions on that event's action list are performed.
A wide variety of actions are available. In fact, there are more than 150 different actions you can use. Actions can handle everything from commonplace tasks like playing MP3s and controlling MPEG videos, to exotic tasks like uploading data to web forms, calling external DLL functions, and downloading files off the Internet. There are actions to control flash objects, actions to work with text files, actions to get input from the user, actions to manipulate strings, actions to start and stop programs, and more.
Actions are a lot like programming statements, but you don't need to be a programmer to use them. At their simplest, actions are just commands that you can use to perform various tasks. Need to read a value from the Registry? Add a "Registry - Get Value Data" action. Need to define a custom variable? Add an "Variable - Set Value" action. It's really that simple.
Of course, actions can also be used together in very advanced ways. The IF, WHILE, and Variable - Set Value actions provide the basic tools you need to build sophisticated decision-making into an AutoPlay application. You can use the IF and END IF actions to form conditional blocks, and you can use the WHILE and END WHILE actions to set up loops. You can even jump between lines in an action list by using the LABEL and GOTO actions.
Next: Actions in a Nutshell