I did a search but couldn’t find anything. Therefore, just wondering if anyone knows if a means exists of creating a list of installed actions for which updates are available in the directory? I appreciate that auto-update would be a nightmare scenario, hence the need to manually review and then update if determining all is OK to proceed. However, it would just be handy, say, to run an action periodically to isolate and output those installed actions with potential updates available, rather than just spotting, on the off chance of going into an individual action’s “Edit action,” GUI. Cheers.
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I think that’s quite involved as some actions have identical names, some are available through action groups, the updates listed on the directory web pages are generalised - e.g. if the directory says an action was updated “two months ago”, and you last updated an action a couple of months back (which you would need to track), how do you know if it was before or after?
What happens if I modified an action group to include an additional action and the group has been updated? What if I modified an action in the group or purposefully removed one?
In addition, there is the speed of checking all of the actions. No doubt I am an edge case, but I have 60 action groups containing almost 1,400 actions. That is going to be a slow update process if it checks all action groups and all actions individually.
For my ThoughtAsylum Action groups, I built in version checking and host some info external to the directory to support it. Checking takes place on the first run of an included action each day and checking can be turned off. Plus I have always recommended to users they include actions from the group in their own groups rather than add, move, modify, duplicate, or remove them. My solution is not exactly scalable, but one simple version number check, once a day at most, for one set of hundreds of actions seems to have worked reasonably well over the years.
I know Greg has said an update mechanism is something he would like to explore in the longer term. But, it is something that has both technical (I don’t think scraping web pages for update info is the ideal solution 
)and end user process aspects (what users have done to/with actions) to it. Regardless of how it might be implemented, you wouldn’t want an update to inadvertently break people’s set up - through accident or ignorance of any changes. Some users may not have action backups enabled, or the last backup could miss a recent but important update they made. There is a fair bit of risk management to deal with on that front.
I imagine as a result this feature (which I would love to see added at some point) would be a significant feature requiring a lot of testing from the community!
Thanks for the feedback. However, Drafts is obviously cognisant that an update is available as it tells you one is on the “Edit action,” panel. I was just wondering if there was a means of programatically sweeping to summarise what Drafts already knows to be the case. I get your over-think bits, but the ability to do a simple sweep was all I was trying to ascertain. It’s obviously not possible is the short answer.
Yes, this is not possible at this time. Installed actions are only checked for updates if you edit them. There’s no background process checking in and building a list of available updates.
I’ve had it on the list to offer some options here, but haven’t considered it a priority. It’s going to cause as many problems as it solves. Once a user installs an action, if it’s working and doing what they want, it’s unlikely there’s a reason to install an update that might change the behavior of the action, possibly override something they changed (like a keyboard shortcut, etc.).
If an action isn’t behaving and you want to check for an update, that option is there but I think it’s mostly best left as a manual process.
OK. Thanks for the info.