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8. Defining custom resource actions

Often your resource types will need additional operations that are not covered by the standard resource operation shapes. For this, there are a set of operation signatures for defining resource actions at the instance and collection level.

To define a custom action you can use the ResourceAction and ResourceCollectionAction signatures from the Azure.Core.ResourceOperations interface. Let’s define a couple of custom actions for the Widget and WidgetPart resources:

import "@azure-tools/typespec-azure-core";


using Azure.Core;
using Azure.Core.Traits;


alias ServiceTraits = SupportsRepeatableRequests &
  SupportsConditionalRequests &
  SupportsClientRequestId;


alias Operations = Azure.Core.ResourceOperations<ServiceTraits>;


// In the Widgets interface...
/** Schedule a widget for repairs. */
scheduleRepairs is Operations.ResourceAction<
  Widget,
  WidgetRepairRequest,
  WidgetRepairRequest
>;


// In the WidgetParts interface...
/** Reorder all parts for the widget. */
reorderParts is Operations.ResourceCollectionAction<
  WidgetPart,
  WidgetPartReorderRequest,
  WidgetPartReorderRequest
>;

The scheduleRepairs operation defines a custom action for all instances of the Widget resource. All collection action templates expect 3 parameters: the resource type, the request action parameters, and the response type. In this case, WidgetRepairRequest is both the parameter and response type because we are using it as the body of both the request and the response of this operation.

NOTE: The request parameters and response type do not have to be the same type!

We also define an collection operation called reorderParts. Similarly to scheduleRepairs, it uses the WidgetPartReorderRequest as the request and response body.

Here are what the routes of these two operations will look like:

/widgets/{widgetName}:scheduleRepairs
/widgets/{widgetName}/parts:reorderParts

Notice that the operation name is used as the action name in the route!

There are also long-running operation versions of these two operations:

  • LongRunningResourceAction
  • LongRunningResourceCollectionAction

The same rules described in the long-running operations section also apply to these long-running action signatures.