What does "IsUrgent" do to an Action?

Usage and Config
1

There is a boolean value “IsUrgent” in the XML of an Action exported from the console.

What does this do? This is the only explination I can find:

This marks the action as urgent for client processing. It should be left out in most
circumstances (defaults to false).

Which comes from here:
http://software.bigfix.com/download/bes/misc/BESImport-ExportReference71_080906.pdf

2

When the client is in its action processing mode it will go through the “urgent” actions first in the loop and move them forward before it checks all other actions. This somewhat tends to coincide with the “new” action getting processed first anyway so generally this is for more complex scenarios. I don’t think I’ve ever seen an action “in the wild” marked this way.

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3

Thanks for the explanation. It doesn’t sound like it will have much effect, but I do have a use case where I may use it.

4

Did you ever use this? I’m wondering if this would actually change anything much in the client loop, or if you can see that the action is marked as urgent in the client log. Just my curiosity really…

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5

I tried to use IsUrgent to test it, and I couldn’t get it to work at all. I think the server rejected my attempts at using it, which lead me to believe that perhaps it was something that was meant for internal use by BigFix itself (hidden actions) and not by anything else.

I originally was wanting to use IsUrgent for doing remote relevance evaluation using an action, which I did get to work, but couldn’t get IsUrgent to work: remote_relevance/python at master · jgstew/remote_relevance · GitHub

As far as I know I have the only solution to doing remote relevance evaluation as the client, (not QnA) but it has no UI and would require a lot of work to make pretty. I don’t have a good use case for it now that the WebUI has BFQuery other than the fact that some things only work in the client context.

I was recently thinking of wanting to use IsUrgent or similar again. My use case this time was taking a mailbox action targeted to 1 and only 1 endpoint in order to do something that is initiated by an operator or user like shutdown the computer, lock the screen, etc…

If the newest action gets processed first, then in most cases that is sufficient for my needs.

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