The Action Object

Owned by Andrea Dennis
Last updated: Nov 24, 2020
3 min read



An Action object holds information about an action performed during a patient’s visit. In addition to the actual action data, an Action object contains information about what kind of action it is which user created it, a description of the action and a reference to a collection of referenced actions. 

Noah 4 introduces two new concepts called Archived Actions and NonCurrentAction – please refer to The Concept of Archived Actions and The Concept of NonCurrent Actions for a description. 



After creating a new Action object – this Action object can be added to the object hierarchy of the active patient using the ModuleAPI in one of two ways:

1)     The new Action can now be added to the current Session object’s actions collection of the active patient.

2)     If the intent is to make the new Action object appear as if it was created at an earlier date, then this is possible by using the current Patient object by using the AddNonCurrentAction method. 



Action Group

A module can use the ActionGroup property to group actions that were saved at the same time. These actions have a one-to-one relationship with each other. The ActionGroup property allows the module to store the same timestamp for each action saved at the same time. This, then, allows it to easily find related actions. For example, when Noah asks a module to open, and passes it an action, the module may want to display other associated actions. If these actions have already been saved with the same ActionGroup value, the module need only match this value to the other actions in the session.

The Noah Session Browser also makes use of the Action Group Property to condense the view of session activity.

Starting with Noah 4.12 Noah will now support a new optional property, Action GUID.  The module developer may optionally populate this data with a GUID value for it's own purposes.  It is very important that the module still make use of the Action Group property.  If this is not done Noah's session browser and other Noah integration will most likely not work as expected.



The default behavior for Noah is that after you have attached an Action to the object hierarchy you can modify its properties whenever you like.
However it is possible to configure Noah such that an attached action object can only be removed or changed while in the current session. In this configuration an attempt to modify an action that does not belong to the current session will cause an exception.

Actions can only be modified by the module that added it.

A module can access information regarding actions through Action Objects. Examples of Action information is - the kind of action, the user that created the action, the module that created the action, and a description of the action.
The module can request another module to be launched, pre-loaded with an existing action to view or edit it.

For further details about the Action object, please refer to the ‘Namespaces,' under 'ModuleAPI Assembly' in the Noah 4 'ModuleAPI.chm' file.

HIMSA requests that developers ensure their modules do not attempt to modify any UnBoundAction created by another module.

In Noah 4, version 4.7, the concept of ‘Fast Data View’ has been added. A Fast Data View is a resume (generated by the module) of the action, and suitable for quick previewing without the time-consuming process of opening the relevant module. Currently supported data formats are Rtf, Jpg and Pdf.

There can only be one Fast Data View for each Action Group. When adding a Fast Data View for an action, the Fast Data Views for the other actions in the Action Group (if any) will be deleted.