Using Manual Actions

Manual actions allow analysts who are reviewing pattern results in Cogynt Workstation to manually trigger an action or event in running patterns, thus changing their results or altering their behavior.

Manual actions can serve a variety of purposes, including error correction and process overrides. The logic of manual actions is highly customizable and defined entirely by users. Manual actions can there be configured to meet a variety of use cases.

Configuring Manual Actions

Cogynt does not have any manual actions configured by default. Manual actions must be defined in Authoring before they can be put to use.

Users can create as many manual actions as desired. The logic for each manual action can be adjusted to suit its intended purpose.

To configure a manual action:

1. Create or select an event type to which manual actions should apply.
2. In the event type's information window, under Manual Actions, click "+".
3. In the Manual Action Name window, enter a name for the manual action. Click the checkmark (✓) icon to save the manual action, or click the cancel (X) icon to discard it.
4. Implement the manual action in your model. The method of implementation is flexible, and depends upon your preferred modeling strategy. For Cogility's preferred approach, see Checking for Manual Actions in Authoring.

tip

Dave's organization uses a complex and reliable model. On rare occasion, the model produces an unnecessary or erroneous report. Since it would be inefficient to retool the entire model in hopes of eliminating these infrequent mistakes, Dave's team has decided to use a manual action to override them instead.

The team creates a manual action called "Report Retraction." It is designed to remove incorrect reports from the reports a pattern publishes.

The team implements the following logic for Report Retraction:

• When the manual action is triggered on a report, Workstation sends a message to a manual action topic in Kafka. The message notes the retraction request, places the report on a list of reports awaiting retraction, and flags the event on which the retraction was triggered.
• A pattern in Authoring is configured to read from that manual action topic.
• The Authoring pattern includes logic that invalidates the report-generating pattern if the same incorrect report is found both in the source data and the list of retracted reports.

Activating Manual Actions

Once a manual action has been configured, two further steps are required to implement the manual action in a model:

1. The manual action must be initiated in Workstation.
2. The model must be primed to check for manual actions in Authoring.

These steps are discussed in detail under the corresponding topic headings.

Initiating Manual Actions in Workstation

When a manual action is initiated in Workstation, it sends a signal to be published to Kafka. Once ingested, this signal can be detected and processed by Authoring. Thus, the first step is to produce the signal so that Authoring can be told what to intercept.

To activate a manual action in Cogynt Workstation:

1. In the Events Stream widget, locate an event that has manual actions.
2. Drag the event to the Object Details Viewer widget.
3. In the Object Details Viewer widget, click the More (⋮) menu, then select Manual Actions.
4. In the Initiate a Manual Action window:
   1. Select a manual action to implement from the dropdown menu.
   2. In the Comment field, leave an optional comment about the manual action.
   3. Click OK to activate the manual action, or Cancel to discard it.

Once OK is clicked, Workstation sends a message to the standard system Kafka topic _cogynt_manual_actions. The manual action takes effect once this topic is ingested into Cogynt.

note

Whether an event has manual actions or not is configured in Authoring. For more information, see Configuring Manual Actions.

The pattern must be deployed for the manual action to appear for selection in Workstation. Additionally, the deployment needs to be running when the manual action is triggered in order for the action to take effect and be visible in Workstation.

If the manual action is triggered while the deployment is not running, its signal remains in the _cogynt_manual_actions topic until the pattern is deployed again. Afterward, all received manual action signals take effect, and Workstation reflects the manual action changes.

Checking for Manual Actions in Authoring

A model requires some mechanism of detecting when a manual action is triggered. This generally involves creating or modifying an event type to check the data stream for manual action signals.

note

Since Cogynt is a flexible system, there is no single method for checking for manual actions. The process outlined here reflects the strategy that most Cogility modelers prefer.

To check for manual actions:

1. Configure a lexicon that contains the list of manual action names to filter against.
2. Create or select an event type that should check for manual actions.
3. In the event type's information window:
   1. Under Source:
      1. Set the Type to Kafka.
      2. Set the Topic to _cogynt_manual_actions.
   2. Under Filter:
      1. Set the Type to Lexicon.
      2. In the Lexicon Name field, specify the manual action to look for.
   3. Under Fields, ensure the desired action is found in the table. For more information about working with lexicons and user data schemas, see Lexicon Authoring and Data Authoring.
4. Map the event type's output in your model as needed.

Deleting Manual Actions

Manual actions that are no longer necessary can be removed from Cogynt.

To remove a manual action:

1. In Authoring, select the event type with the manual action to delete.
2. In the event type's information window, under Manual Actions, click the Remove (X) icon on the corresponding chip.
3. Remove any extraneous event types (such as those made in Checking for Manual Actions in Authoring) as needed.

warning

If manual actions are removed from a pattern's logic, instances of those actions that were applied to events will not persist, and will be undone if the pattern is redeployed later.