Overview

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What are Triggers?

Triggers are entry points that initiate workflow execution. While workflows can be run manually by providing input, triggers enable automatic execution based on specific events or schedules without human intervention.

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Types of Triggers

Triggers are categorized into two main types:

• Manual: Execute workflows on-demand through the UI or API by providing input data
• Automatic: Run workflows automatically based on events or schedules, including:
  • Scheduler: Execute at specified intervals using cron expressions

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Creating a Trigger

This example demonstrates how to create a scheduler (an automatic trigger). You can add triggers to existing workflows, and a single workflow can have multiple triggers, each serving different purposes.

To create a trigger:

1. Navigate to your target workflow
2. Click the plus button in the workflow builder toolbar
3. Select the Scheduler trigger from the modal (or any other trigger)
4. The trigger step will be added to your workflow

The following video demonstrates adding a trigger to an existing “fields extraction” workflow:

You can connect multiple steps to a trigger, which will execute like a normal workflow. In essence, a trigger is a special step that can initiate another workflow within a workflow, with the key difference being that it’s activated by an event rather than manual input.

Here’s how to connect steps to a trigger:

Connect the first step to the trigger, then link subsequent steps sequentially, creating a workflow chain. This chain can include conditionals, loops, branches, and other steps, just like a regular workflow. The main difference is that it’s triggered by an event rather than manual execution with input data.

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Executing Automatic Triggers Manually

You can manually execute automatic triggers for testing or immediate execution without waiting for scheduled times or events. This is useful for:

• Testing triggers
• Debugging trigger behavior
• Running triggers immediately without waiting for events to occur

There are two methods to manually execute a trigger:

1. Click the play button on the Trigger step header to initiate a new trigger run, executing all connected steps.
2. Use the dropdown menu on the workflow run button. By default, it shows Manual trigger (standard workflow execution with input data). The dropdown also lists all other triggers in the workflow, allowing you to select and execute specific triggers without navigating to the trigger step.

Here’s a demonstration of executing both Manual and Automatic triggers in the same workflow using the dropdown menu. In this video, we first execute the Manual trigger, which is the standard workflow execution with input data, and then execute the Automatic trigger, which in this case is the scheduler:

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Automatic Trigger Behavior

Automatic triggers operate according to these key rules:

1. Deployment Required: Triggers only activate when a workflow is deployed and remain inactive in draft mode.

2. Latest Version Only: Only triggers in the most recently deployed workflow version are active. Deploying a new version automatically deactivates triggers in previous versions.

3. Trigger Persistence: Triggers removed from a draft remain active in production based on the last deployed version until new changes are deployed.

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Pause and Resume Automatic Triggers

You can pause all automatic triggers in a workflow by toggling the switch in the workflow header inside the version badge. When paused:

• All automatic triggers in the workflow become inactive and won’t execute automatically based on their configuration
• You can still manually execute the triggers as described in the Executing Automatic Triggers Manually section
• The pause state persists across workflow deployments

To resume trigger execution, toggle the switch back to the enabled state to reactivate all automatic triggers in the workflow.

This feature is useful when you need to temporarily disable automated executions while maintaining the workflow’s configuration and ability to run manually.

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Next Steps

Learn more about the configuration options for each trigger type: