How can I get pragmatically all certain actions from Rules and Components?

Question

On rules settings page (admin/config/workflow/rules) and components page (admin/config/workflow/rules/components) you can specify action (like 'send e-mail') for each of rule or component.

How can I get pragmatically all certain (e.g.: 'send e-mail') actions from Rules and Components?

Answer 1

This function should do the trick:

/**
 * Find all rules with action name matching a string pattern
 *
 * @param $pattern
 *  String pattern to check action names
 *
 * @param $active
 *  Boolean whether to limit the search to active rules only
 *
 * @return
 *  Array with rule names with actions matching the pattern as keys and arrays of rule 
 *  action names as values
 */
function search_rules_for_action($pattern, $active_only = TRUE) {
  $active_only = ($active_only) ? array('active' => 1) : array();
  $rules = rules_config_load_multiple(FALSE, $active_only);
  $matching_rules = array();
  foreach ($rules AS $rule_name => $rule) {
    if (method_exists($rule, 'actions') === TRUE) {
      foreach ($rule->actions() as $action) {
        if (method_exists($action, 'getElementName') == TRUE) {
          $action_name = $action->getElementName();
          if (stripos($action_name, $pattern) !== FALSE) {
            $matching_rules[$rule_name][] = $action_name;
          }
        }
      }
    }
  }
  return $matching_rules;
}