Flex Core: Events and Notifications

Events

An event is something that happens in Dalet Flex at some point in time. Nearly every significant occurrence results in an event being created and stored. Event data is used extensively throughout Dalet Flex. For example, events are used for generating recent activity views as well as reports.

One key reason for Dalet Flex being an event-driven system is that it is not designed to work in isolation. As a workflow platform, it is likely that other systems need to be made aware when relevant events occur in Dalet Flex, so it can act as the source of an event, and external event subscribers can be notified of pertinent events and react accordingly. The source of an Dalet Flex event is typically an
Dalet Flex object.

Under the Desktop tab, you can see a variety of different event types in the Recent Activity section.
Below you can see some examples of different event types:

Event Search

Events in Dalet Flex can be searched, and are also used in the Dashboard and Object History tabs as a means of providing real-time updates on the state of the system and important occurrences. Events can be searched using a range of fields, including event-specific properties.

To initiate an events search, click the Desktop tab.

On the toolbar on the right hand side, click the Events option.

In the Search Events section, specify the criteria for the search.

Click the Search button, and the results will be listed below.

Event Data

Every event generated in Dalet Flex comprises the following header data:

• Id: Every event has a unique Id.
• Time: The time that the event occurred.
• Message: A human-readable message providing information about the event.
• Exception: If this event was generated as a result of an error, a stack trace may be provided to assist with debugging.
• Severity: The severity of the event (error, info, warning).
• Type: The object type that generated the event (i.e. a user).
• Event Type: The particular event type (i.e. new user created
• Owner: The user that generated this event.
• Object: A reference to the Dalet Flex object that generated the event.
• Properties: A "payload" of key-value pairs that capture the context and state of the environment when the event was generated.

Event Properties

Event properties are key-value pairs that are stored with each event that is recorded. The event properties provide an extensible means of storing a snapshot of all relevant context and state the point at which an event was generated.

Event Handlers and Filters

Event handlers comprise of a filter and a handler. The filter is a rule that matches against specific types of events. The handler responds to the filtered events and processes them in some way. The event handler system supports an API so that developers can create their own plugins to consume events and handle them.

Dalet Flex is an event-driven system. This means that it can be used to communicate with other systems in your enterprise. An event can be defined as "a significant change in state". For example, when a user publishes an asset, the asset's state changes from "Un-published" to "Published". This results in the generation of an asset event. The Dalet Flex system architecture treats this state change as an event whose occurrence can be made known to Dalet Flex and other applications. Dalet Flex's event-driven architecture builds on its object-orientated concept, as events are generated when Dalet Flex objects change their state. Hence, the source of an event is typically a Dalet Flex object that resides within the system.

Notification Box

The notification box notifies you of events that have happened in Dalet Flex that are relevant to you.
Events generated from objects you are following will appear in the notification box. The notification box auto-refreshes so you are always kept up to date with relevant events as they occur, without the need to manually refresh your browser.

To reveal/hide the notification box, simply click the arrow located at the bottom-right corner of the box. The box will then collapse or expand accordingly.

Clearing Events

You can clear events that are no longer of interest to you by clicking the cross next to an entry. You can also clear all events by severity by clicking the relevant cross at the top of the pop-up box.

Notification Types

There are three event types in Dalet Flex. These are errors, warnings, and information. These are also colour coded, to help you differentiate between them. Errors are red, warnings are orange, and information is green. By clicking on one of the crosses at the top of the notification box, you can clear the events by type.
For example if you were to click the red cross, it would clear all the errors from the notification box.

At the bottom of the notification box, you can see how many of each event type you have. In the example below, there are 18 information events in total.

Rolling over each event in the list will reveal a tooltip. This tooltip contains information about that specific event.

Managing Events

Events in Dalet Flex are fully searchable, and they are also used in dashboards and object history tabs as a means of providing real-time updates on the state of the system and important occurrences.

An event is something that happens in Dalet Flex at some point in time. Nearly every significant occurrence in Dalet Flex results in an event being created and stored. Event data is used extensively throughout Dalet Flex.
For example, events are used for generating recent activity views as well as reports.

Object History

In the Details section for an object, you will see a History sub-tab. This sub-tab shows a list of events associated with that specific object. The tab lists all events in reverse chronological order.

Rolling over an entry will show a tooltip which contains event data.