In the world of business, efficiency is king. We've moved from manual data entry to spreadsheets, and from spreadsheets to sophisticated software. The next evolution is here: intelligent, automated workflows that run themselves. But how do these automations know when to start? The answer lies in a simple but powerful concept: the event trigger.
At its core, a trigger is the starting pistol for an automated process. It’s the "When this happens..." in the classic "When this happens, do that" formula. This post will demystify event triggers and show you how they serve as the foundation for modern, agentic workflows on platforms like Triggers.do.
Think of a trigger as a digital listening post. It’s a predefined event that, when it occurs, automatically initiates one or more workflows without any human intervention.
Imagine you want to send a welcome email to every new customer who signs up. The event is the "new customer signup." The trigger is the rule you create that listens for that specific event. The workflow is the action of sending the welcome email.
With Triggers.do, we take this concept a step further by allowing you to define these powerful triggers as simple, declarative code, giving you full control and versioning capabilities over your business logic.
A workflow automation platform is only as powerful as the events it can connect to. The goal is to trigger workflows from any event, anywhere in your technical ecosystem. Here are the most common sources:
Manually configuring triggers through complex UI screens can be clumsy and hard to track. Triggers.do champions a code-first approach, enabling you to define, version, and manage triggers with the same rigor as your application code.
Let’s look at a practical example. Say you want to launch a special workflow for high-value orders from your Shopify store. Here’s how you might define that trigger:
import { trigger } from '@do-sdk/triggers';
// Define a trigger that starts a workflow when a new
// high-value order is received from Shopify.
await trigger.create({
name: 'High-Value Shopify Order',
event: 'shopify.order.created',
filter: 'body.total_price > 100.00',
workflow: 'process-high-value-order',
});
Let's break this down:
True business process automation often involves more than a single action. A new high-value order might require several things to happen at once.
With a platform built for event-driven automation, a single trigger can initiate multiple, parallel workflows. For example, the High-Value Shopify Order event could simultaneously kick off:
This ability to orchestrate complex, branching processes from a single event is what separates basic automation from a truly agentic system.
In .do, a trigger is a defined event that automatically initiates one or more workflows. Think of it as the 'When this happens...' part of a 'When this happens, do that' rule, all managed as simple code.
You can trigger workflows from virtually any event source: incoming webhooks from services like Stripe or GitHub, messages from a queue, database changes, scheduled times (cron jobs), or custom events emitted from your own applications.
Yes. Our platform allows you to apply conditional logic to incoming event payloads. You can write simple expressions to filter events, ensuring that workflows only run when specific criteria are met, such as an order value exceeding $100.
Absolutely. A single event can be configured to trigger multiple, parallel workflows. This enables you to orchestrate complex, branching business processes, like notifying sales, updating inventory, and starting fulfillment, all from one new order event.
Ready to automate your processes? Trigger Workflows From Any Event and let our agents handle the rest.