You can think of a component as a black box of UI functionality.
So far, you've learned how parent components can pass attributes in to a
child component, and how that component can use those attributes from
both JavaScript and its template.

But what about the opposite direction? How does data flow back out of
the component to the parent? In Ember, components use **actions** to
communicate events and changes.

Let's look at a simple example of how a component can use an action to
communicate with its parent.

Imagine we're building an application where users can have accounts. We
need to build the UI for users to delete their account. Because we don't
want users to accidentally delete their accounts, we'll build a button
that requires the user to confirm in order to trigger some
action.

Once we create this "button with confirmation"
component, we want to be able to reuse it all over our application.

## Creating the Component

Let's call our component `button-with-confirmation`. We can create it by
typing:

```shell
ember generate component button-with-confirmation
```

We'll plan to use the component in a template something like this:

```app/templates/components/user-profile.hbs
{{button-with-confirmation text="Click OK to delete your account."}}
```

We'll also want to use the component elsewhere, perhaps like this:

```app/templates/components/send-message.hbs
{{button-with-confirmation text="Click OK to send your message."}}
```

## Designing the Action

When implementing an action on a component, you need to break it down into two steps:

1. In the parent component, decide how you want to react to the action.
   Here, we want to have the action delete the user's account in one place, and
   send a message in another place.
2. In the component, determine when something has happened, and when to tell the
   outside world. Here, we want to trigger the outside action (deleting the
   account or sending the message) after the user clicks the button and then
   confirms.

Let's take it step by step.

## Implementing the Action

In the parent component, let's first define what we want to happen when the
user clicks the button and then confirms. In this case, we'll find the user's
account and delete it.

First, we'll define what we want to happen when the user double clicks
the button. In this case, we'll find the user's account and delete it.

In Ember, each component can
have a property called `actions`, where you put functions that can be
[invoked by the user interacting with the component
itself](../../templates/actions/), or by child components.

Let's look at the parent component's JavaScript file. In this example,
imagine we have a parent component called `user-profile` that shows the
user's profile to them.

We'll implement an action on the parent component called
`userDidDeleteAccount()` that, when called, gets a hypothetical `login`
[service](../../applications/services/) and calls the service's
`deleteUser()` method.

```app/components/user-profile.js
export default Ember.Component.extend({
  login: Ember.inject.service(),

  actions: {
    userDidDeleteAccount() {
      this.get('login').deleteUser();
    }
  }
});
```

Now we've implemented our action, but we have not told Ember when we
want this action to be triggered, which is the next step.

## Designing the Child Component

Next, let's implement the logic to confirm that the user wants to take
the action from the component:

```app/components/button-with-confirmation.js
export default Ember.Component.extend({
  tagName: 'button',
  click() {
    if (confirm(this.get('text'))) {
      // trigger action on parent component
    }
  }
});
```

## Passing the Action to the Component

Now we just need to make it so that the `onConfirm()` event in the
`button-with-confirmation()` component triggers the
`userDidDeleteAccount()` action in the `user-profile` component.
One important thing to know about actions is that they're **just
functions** you can call, like any other method on your component.
So they can be passed from one component to another like this:

```app/components/user-profile.hbs
{{button-with-confirmation text="Click here to delete your account." onConfirm=(action 'userDidDeleteAccount')}}
```

This snippet says "take the `userDidDeleteAccount` action from the
parent and make it available on the child component as
`onConfirm`."

We can do a similar thing for our `send-message` component:

```app/templates/components/send-message.hbs
{{button-with-confirmation text="Click to send your message." onConfirm=(action 'sendMessage')}}
```

Now, we can use `onConfirm` in the child component to invoke the action on the
parent:

```app/components/button-with-confirmation.js
export default Ember.Component.extend({
  tagName: 'button',
  click() {
    if (confirm(this.get('text'))) {
      this.get('onConfirm')();
    }
  }
});
```

`this.get('onConfirm')` will return the function passed from the parent as the
value of `onConfirm`, and the following `()` will invoke the function.

Like normal attributes, actions can be a property on the component; the
only difference is that the property is set to a function that knows how
to trigger behavior.

That makes it easy to remember how to add an action to a component. It's
just like passing an attribute, but you use the `action` helper to pass
a function instead.

Actions in components allow you to
decouple an event happening from how it's handled, leading to modular,
more reusable components.
