ActionSet element type to render actions anywhere

Release	Renderer status	Tasks status
1.2	✔️ .NET (#2438) ✔️ Android (#2439) ✔️ iOS (#2440) ✔️ TS (#2441) ✔️ UWP (#2225)	✔️ Shared (#2437)

Solves requests

• Be able to use actions (buttons) anywhere within card body (#2027)

Summary

Allow authors to place an “action bar” (or multiple) anywhere within the card body, by introducing an ActionSet element, which takes an array of actions.

This is rendered identically to the existing actions bar - meaning the host gets to choose the button orientation (horizontal/vertical) and alignment (left/center/right/stretch). This lets authors create the cards they want, while still achieving that host consistency of how the buttons are oriented and aligned.

Note that the maxActions from host config is also enforced. The maxActions only apply to a single ActionSet… so if you have two ActionSets and maxActions is 5, you can have 10 buttons on your card.

Schema

New element, ActionSet

Property	Type	Required	Description
type	"ActionSet"	Yes	The type of the element
id	string	No	A unique identifier associated with the element.
spacing	string	No	Controls the amount of spacing between this element and the preceding element.
separator	bool	No	When true, draw a separating line at the top of the element.
actions	Action[]	Yes	The actions to be displayed.
<strike>horizontalAlignment</strike>	<strike>string</strike>	<strike>No</strike>	Does NOT have horizontalAlignment property, since it wouldn’t do anything, since hosts get to pick the alignment of buttons. If an author wanted to force the buttons to the left, they could place it in a ColumnSet.

Example

...
                {
                    "type": "ActionSet",
                    "actions": [
                        {
                            "type": "Action.OpenUrl",
                            "title": "Set due date",
                            "url": "https://msn.com"
                        },
                        {
                            "type": "Action.OpenUrl",
                            "title": "View",
                            "url": "https://msn.com"
                        }
                    ]
                },
                {
                    "type": "FactSet",
                    "facts": [
                        {
                            "title": "Board:",
                            "value": "Adaptive Card"
                        },
                        {
                            "title": "List:",
                            "value": "Backlog"
                        },
                        {
                            "title": "Assigned to:",
                            "value": "Matt Hidinger"
                        },
                        {
                            "title": "Due date:",
                            "value": "Not set"
                        }
                    ]
                }

Examples with different host configs. Note that author doesn’t get to control the alignment.

Host config	Example
Horizontal, stretch
Horizontal, left
Vertical, center
Vertical, right

Host Config

No changes.

Down-level impact

Medium. ActionSet will be dropped.

Host burden

Theoretically no burden.

Renderer requirements

• A renderer MUST render the ActionSet using everything from the actions HostConfig except the spacing (the author picks the spacing).
  • Apply the maxActions limit independently to each ActionSet
  • Use the buttonSpacing between buttons
  • Respect the showCard host settings
  • Use the actionsOrientation and actionAlignment
• A renderer MUST treat ShowCards as follows…
  • Each individual ActionSet behaves independently of others. Thus, if there are 2 ActionSets (and the bottom action bar), each of these three can all have a ShowCard visible at once. Interacting with ShowCards on one ActionSet does NOT cause a different ActionSet’s ShowCard to disappear.
• (More requirements needed, not complete list)

Auto-generated task status

• Shared
• .NET
• Android
• iOS
• TS
• UWP

[yaronism]

Hi @matthidinger,

We are using MSBF and using this capability with one of our customers which is production. Out of a sudden you decided to remove this feature and their chatbot stopped functioning due to this unilateral decision. Please bring it back ASAP. You can mark it as deprecated but please don’t just exclude things which were part from the product before.

[dclaux]

For folks using the TypeScript renderer (as in rendering cards using the TypeScript renderer in your own application, not sending cards to clients that use the TypeScript renderer to render them) you can already enable support for ActionSet using this one liner:

AdaptiveCard.elementTypeRegistry.registerType("ActionSet", () => { return new Adaptive.ActionSet(); });