Enabling the XNAT Event Service

The XNAT Event Service, introduced in XNAT 1.8, allows site administrators and project owners to schedule automated actions in response to defined data events within XNAT. Learn more about its core functionality here: Using the XNAT Event Service

Enabling the Event Service is a very simple task, but it has the potential to unleash a lot of power to your users and should be monitored very carefully. Be sure to test this functionality thoroughly on production-like data before deploying onto a production system.

How to Enable the Event Service

As a user with administrator privileges, browse to the Administrator -> Event Service page.

How to Enable Container Actions in the Event Service

By default, core XNAT has a very limited set of actions available to it. The power of the Event Service comes when event subscriptions are tied to the Container Service. In order to do this, you must have the Container Service plugin installed, an installed Container Image, and an enabled Command associated with the project that you want your subscription to affect.

This video tutorial is taken from the Container Service 101 course on XNAT Academy.

See: Actions in the Event Service

As you can see in the brief video demonstration, it is all too easy to overwhelm an XNAT server with container execution requests. We strongly recommend enabling and configuring Docker Swarm mode in your container host to enable queuing of requests.