Action pause or wait

Is there any way to have more than one action “running” at a time? I have attempted to have action “wait/pause” both in Bigfix and PowerShell. I’m attempting to allow users control the flow of automation plans with a “pause” until some manual operation is completed, they then update a file releasing the plan to the next step. It looks like the first action blocks every other action.

There are several aspects there. If you are talking about a single action waiting for them to clear a condition, you can do that with something like

pause while {exists file "c:\temp\user-controlled-file.txt"}

That will pause the execution of this action, but will also block any other action from running. BigFix runs only one action at a time, otherwise you could get in to some seriously bad conditions like multiple installers running at the same time.

Are you wanting to pause between multiple steps in one baseline, while allowing other baselines to run? I haven’t tried this but have done something similar for maintenance windows using custom action constraints. It may be cumbersome and, depending on your use case, may or may not be worthwhile. I’ll let you judge.

What you’d need to do is to create a new Global Property. Name it something like 'User says OK to proceed'. The Relevance on it would be something like exists file "c:\temp\user-controlled-file.txt".

You can then create a Baseline of your separate steps. When you Action the baseline, you’d use the scheduling screen and set the ‘Run only when … User says OK to proceed … is true’.

If it works as I’d expect, when you action the baseline and the file is not present, the action would go into the state of Constrained. when the user creates the file, the constraint changes to true and the baseline actions should start running. If the user (or a task in your baseline) removes the file, the baseline should go back into Constrained and pause running the rest of the actions (while allowing other actions to run, as long as they are not also using the same custom constraint).

In practice I’m not sure whether the presence/absence of the file will be evaluated quickly enough to pause the baseline in between components, but I think there’s a good chance it would work. I’d expect the Custom Constraint criteria to get evaluated between each baseline component, as it looks like it evaluates the same way as action date/time constraints.

The other option that comes to mind is to craft the relevance of each of the baseline components so that the component does not become relevant until the user creates the file or adds a specific line to the file. That may not respond as quickly because it may take the duration of the client evaluation cycle to determine that an action that was not relevant before, has become relevant again.

Thank you Jason! This is exactly what I needed.