Glossary · Workflow design
Trigger
Also called: workflow trigger, start event, trigger event
A trigger is the event that starts a workflow run: a person pressing Run, a schedule coming due, a webhook arriving, or a new record or event in a connected app.
Every workflow has exactly one way in. What comes after it (actions, logic, approvals) is the same regardless of how the run started, so choosing the trigger is mostly about when and with what data the run begins.
The four kinds
- Manual. Someone presses Run, or calls the API. Good for on-demand jobs and while you're building.
- Scheduled. A clock, written as a daily or weekly rule or a cron expression. Good for reports, digests and batch syncs.
- Webhook. Another system POSTs to the workflow's URL. Fastest, and the trigger carries the event's data. Needs the sender to support webhooks.
- App event. The platform watches a connected app for a new or changed record, by polling or webhook, and starts a run per item.
Choosing
Ask what the business event actually is. "When a lead submits the form" is a webhook. "Every Monday" is a schedule. "When a deal reaches Closed Won" is an app event. If you catch yourself scheduling a run every minute to check for something new, an app event or webhook trigger is the better fit.
One trigger event can start many runs: a poll that finds five new rows starts five runs, one per row. Design each run to handle exactly one item.
In Fluxo Flow
Fluxo Flow has all four: Manual (the Run button or the REST API), Scheduled (daily, weekly, monthly or cron, in your time zone), Webhook (a fixed URL with a secret header, HMAC signature or both) and App event (a new record or event in a connected app, checked on your plan's schedule interval or delivered instantly where the app supports it). Configuring a trigger doesn't switch it on: schedules, webhooks and app events are activated on purpose. On the Free plan you can build and Dry Run any trigger; live triggers need a paid plan.
Read next
Related terms
- ActionAn action is a workflow step that does something outside the workflow, such as creating a CRM record, sending an email, posting to Slack or calling an API.
- WorkflowA workflow is a repeatable sequence of steps, started by a trigger, that turns an input (a form, an invoice, a new deal) into an outcome, with defined rules for each decision along the way.
- WebhookA webhook is an HTTP request that one system sends to a URL you give it, automatically, the moment an event happens, so the receiver doesn't have to keep asking.
- Cron expressionA cron expression is a compact five-field string (minute, hour, day of month, month, day of week) that tells a scheduler exactly when to run a job.
- TokenA token is the unit of text a language model reads and writes, usually a word, part of a word or a punctuation mark, and the unit AI providers use to price usage and set context limits.