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On the right side you can view the details of the Lookup action. You'll notice that there is a place for entering a brief description of the action. It's not necessary to enter anything here, but it's a good idea, as it makes the action sequence much easier to read. The Configuration section is where action specific configuration information is entered; each component has its own editor for settings that make sense for it. In this case there is This particular action has an area to specify the database connection, the query, and the expected contents of the query result. Now lets click on the "+" sign next to this action in the Process Actions tree. Notice that there are four outputs from this action. The rule-result output is where the results of the query are stored. The remaining three outputs correspond to particular columns within the rule-result output. Other actions that follow can use these outputs as their inputs. So, one action can leave outputs that following actions can use as inputs. Additionally each action has available to it the inputs from the document. These are the things that are coming in from the outside world. The idea is that each little action has something it can do really well. It takes in some input does some work and leaves some output for some other action(s) to use. Your job is to tie these individual actions together to do something meaningful.
XML Source Tab
Ultimately an action sequence document is nothing more than an XML document. The XML Source Tab is where to go if you wish to view or edit the raw XML. Keep in mind that manually manipulating the XML is not encouraged.