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Visualizing data is great, but at some point you’re going to want to interact with it.

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What is an action?

An action is a button that triggers server-side logic through an API call. Without a single line of code, Forest natively supports all common actions required on an admin interface such as CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete), sort, search, data export, and more.

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Native actions vs Smart Actions

In Forest, all the available actions can fall into 2 categories.

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Native actions

Those actions come out-of-the-box. We’ve covered them in details from a route perspective in Routes. The most common ones are:
  • Create: create a new record in a given collection
  • Duplicate: create a new record from an existing one
  • Update: edit a record’s data
  • Delete: remove a record
Some actions are only available when 1+ record(s) are selected. This depends on their type.
Native actions’ permissions are set from the Roles section of the Project settings.

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Smart Actions

Smart actions are your own business-related actions, built with your own code. You’ll learn how to use them in the following page.
Smart actions can be triggered from the Actions button or directly from a Summary view.

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Triggering different types of actions

Triggering an action is very simple, but the behavior can differ according to the type of action. There are 3 types of actions :
  • Bulk actions: the action will be available when you click on one or several desired records
  • Single actions: the action is only available for one selected record at a time
  • Global actions: the action is always available and will be executed on all records
In the following pages, we’ll cover everything you need to know about interacting with your data through actions.