# Tasks

A task is like a ”secondary action” assigned to an endpoint. The primary action is the \<success> and \<error> action described in [Types of Endpoints](/open-endpoints/configuration/types-of-endpoints.md). The "secondary" action may contain zero or many tasks, that will be executed once the primary action has been completed successfully.

{% hint style="info" %}
**Task vs Primary Action**

The task does some action, but the response body of the task is not part of the response to the client's request. The response to the request might be a simple "status 200", while the request had triggered the execution of a task which did have a response body.
{% endhint %}

With a task you can

* send a request to any API => [HttpRequest Task](/open-endpoints/configuration/tasks/httprequest-task.md)
* send emails with attachments => [Email Task](/open-endpoints/configuration/tasks/email-task.md)

Each \<task> is a set of commands embedded into an endpoint-definition in the endpoints.xml:

```xml
<endpoint name="foo">
    <success>...</success>
    <error>...</error>
    <!-- zero or many tasks -->
    <task class="...">
       ...
    </task>
    <task class="...">
       ...
    </task>
</endpoint>
```

### Parallel or Subsequent Execution of Tasks

Offer-Ready uses multiple cores, if available. If not specified otherwise, tasks are executed in parallel and will be finished in an arbitrary order. In order to determine a distinctive order of tasks, read [Parallel or Subsequent Execution of Tasks](/open-endpoints/configuration/tasks/parallel-or-subsequent-execution-of-tasks.md).

### Intermediate Values

If a task requires the output from a second task as an output, you may use [Intermediate Values](/open-endpoints/configuration/tasks/intermediate-values.md).


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