Table of contents

What are Triggered Actions?

Triggered Actions allow configuring actions that are applied to a list or library when an event occurs (add, update or add/update) and some condition evaluates to 'true'. 

"Triggered Actions" is a SharePoint Online exclusive feature. They will not be executed in an On-Premises deployment. 

Key features: 

• Execute actions on trigger : Item Added, Item Updated, Item Added & Updated 
• e.g. send email notifications or update items when some event occurs 
• Serial execution of multiple actions
• Define execution condition on each action
• Use FieldName.isChanged placeholder to execute Triggered Action only if field value is changed

Configuration UI

Just configure triggered actions on the "Things in Background" tab like a rule to plan automated executions with actions from a set of powerful action types. 

Be aware that Triggered Actions feature works only when item versioning is enabled.

Clicking the 'Add Triggered Action' button in the lower left corner leads to a wizard similar to the Scheduled Actions wizard, except the second step - triggers of execution.

By default, all Background Features executions: Aggregation, Metadata Inheritance, Calculated Expressions, Scheduled Actions, and Triggered Actions - don't activate triggered action execution.

But there is a new option ‘Execute triggered actions’ which allows execution of triggered actions by current calculated value configuration.

It is visible on UI only if versioning is enabled.

The best practice is to use it together with a condition on field change in triggered action configuration. It allows to reduce unneeded executions.

For this we implemented the [[FieldName.isChanged]] placeholders for each field that return true/false value.

Background features loop handling

Complex background features configurations have many risks of creating loops, especially when ‘Execute triggered actions’ option is enabled for some calculated values.

To foresee this, we implemented a loop detection functionality that is executed whenever the background feature configuration is saved. You are prevented from saving such a configuration, but we are providing information about the loop source.

In most cases it can be resolved by one of the following actions:

• Disabling "Execute Triggered Actions" option for calculated value (only when versioning is enabled)
• Changing lists/columns for calculated value configurations
• Changing trigger type and/or actions for the triggered actions

When the configuration is changed and there is no loop threat anymore, the configuration can be saved.