I often find myself digging through action groups in an attempt to find the action(s) that is / are inevitably in error.
To do so i copy the scripting of one action in the action group & then open the quick actions menu to sort of recreate that action & test it / run it alone.
This works fine until you have an actions group with countless actions as testing each one line by line is very laborious & even disheartening at times.
Which brings me to my point...
I'D like to formally request a "test action" button be added to the action groups editing window.
With it users could test a specific action within the action group therby confirming the action in question is working as the user would like saving much MUCH more time.
For what kind of actions would you use such a test?
I would think that most actions are pretty straightforward.
If you want to test format strings, use Convert>Tag-Tag and its preview.
Any action really. What happens is i usually have an action group that may have 20 lines of actions within. Everything is working & then i get a file that maybe i didnt account for when creating the action & now I need to go through & find which portion of the action group is responsible for this new error.
In this senario being able to test each action as i go down the list would massively help me troubleshoot. Sometimes based on the nature of the error i can easily narrow down where the problem lies. But im editing an action group that has a very large number of actions in it & i honesty dont remeber how i pulled this off in the first place. So its taking me a bit more time than usual
I think what you are asking for is a "debug" mode, where you could step through actions within a group. I agree that this would be useful in some situations. However there is another approach (available now) that approximates that. You could use the "Preset" feature.
For example, say you now have 20 actions in one group. You would break these out into 20 individual actions and then run them all in order from one Preset. Then it would be easy to run one or more component actions at a time for debugging. Yes, it would be a pain to copy the current grouped actions into 20 discrete actions, but that chore would only have to be done once.
Before creating the Preset group, be sure to arrange the component actions in the order that you wish them to execute.
This is more or less what im doing now. I just don't create a preset as its usually not needed. I use the quick action menu to recreate one step (action) from the action group & then after running that step of the action group I look at the tags. Either that step worked or it didn't & ill see that & make any changes necessary.
But if I could skip that pain of action recreation I'd be very happy & more productive.
Issues like this for me usually only happen after an action group has been completely finished & some time has passed. Everything was working smoothly but ive now run into a senario that was unaccounted for.
When i create action group I usually test it multiple times action by action as I go specifically to stomp out issues as they come rather than hunt them down when they have camouflaged themselves within the crowd.
In these rare cases though troubleshooting just takes a lot because there's no easy way to comb through an action group.
I think it would help a lot if you could tick an action on/off within an action group to hinder its execution. Then you could tick/untick an action to test how it affects the outcome of an action group, without having to temporarily edit the target field(s) or delete the action.
You could also untick all actions except one to test them one at a time.
And you could duplicate an action to make (test) edits while still keeping the original one untouched and unticked.
Very well put. Essentially the checkbox options available within the main action / action groups window would be extended to the individual actions within the action groups themselves.
Active & inactive actions just like we have active & inactive action groups.
That might be the perfect solution! @Florian@7stones has given us GOLD