About Packs and Plug-ins

This topic includes the following:

• About the Plugin Manager
• About Package Manager
• Working with Packs and Plug-ins
• About Action Builder
• Working with Actions

What are Packs?

The currently supported plug-ins are known as Packs. These plug-ins consist of Automation Engine objects and may include CDA-specific objects.

What are Action Packs?

Action Packs are outbound integrations with third-party products such as Amazon S3, Docker, and Tomcat for automation purposes. They group actions that are related to each other (for example, Windows File System Actions).

Pack Folder Structure

• <PACKAGE_NAME>

  Top-level folder containing all Action Pack content

• ACTIONS

  An Action contains workflows for the Pack that has been created (or a link to the referenced workflow).

• CONFIG

  Contains static VARA objects or other objects that are used to store the configuration

• DOCUMENTATION

  Documentation objects containing license and pack documentation

• RESOURCES

  Pack resources that are used across multiple Actions.

• INTERPRETERS

  Storage object containing binaries of external interpreters

• LIBS

  Storage object containing binaries such as Java JAR files or compiled libraries

• SCRIPTS

  Storage objects containing external, interpreted scripts

• SOURCE

  Contains the internals for each Action such as sub-workflows, jobs, scripts objects, VARA objects, and so on.

• TEMPLATES

  Contains template workflows, which are registered in the UC_OBJECT_TEMPLATE. Actions from other Packs the current Pack depends on can also be incorporated into this Folder.

Important! From version 12.3, Action Packs can be imported and exported in two different formats: .xml and .json . You can define which format to use in the PACKS_COMPATIBILITY_MODE parameter of the UC_CLIENT_SETTINGS (Plugin Manager) or by adding the corresponding option in the apm download command (Package Manager).

For more information, see:

• UC_CLIENT_SETTINGS - Various Client Settings
• Getting Help and Further Commands (CLI) - Download Packs

Types of Packs

Packs, Action Packs are classified into categories, which help users identify their purpose. The category of a Pack is displayed in the Packs view of the Administration perspective.

Packs and Action Packs may have, among others, the following categories: Network, Download, SCM, Versioning and so on.

You can define your own category for custom Action Packs. Category types are defined in the METADATA VARA object of a Pack.