Triggers

A Trigger on Connect iPaaS workflows serves as the starting point of the workflow. Any activity configured on your trigger application either manually or by an API call performed by some third-party application causes your workflow to start processing.

Each trigger application on Connect iPaaS provides one or more triggers that are stimulated only on specific events of that application. The trigger sends this event to the downstream action applications for further processing.

Triggers initiate the business process by listening to a specific event of a specific ecosystem and sending the corresponding event to the downstream action applications for further processing.

You can choose the application trigger to serve your business use case, such as "A new incident is created" in ServiceNow, "A new email received" in your Gmail account or "A new deal is created" in your HubSpot account.

Types of Triggers

A trigger can either work in real-time or can work at a fixed interval. This difference in the working of the triggers depends on the use case or the provisions made by the applications. There are two types of Triggers:

• Real-Time Trigger (Webhook)
• Polling

What is Webhook?

Webhook types of triggers are real-time triggers that are fired as soon as an event is generated on the target application. For webhook to work, the target application bears the responsibility to notify Connect iPaaS when a change of interest is made in the target application.

For example, in case of Object Created trigger of Salesforce (Object: Contact), as soon as a contact is created, Salesforce sends a notification to Connect iPaaS along with the information about the contact which is updated via an API call. The exact mechanism of this notification varies across different applications. This mechanism of notifying is known as a webhook.

For example, setting up a webhook in Gmail is a fully automated process, which is taken care of by Connect iPaaS. On the other hand, setting up a webhook in Salesforce is a manual process and requires user intervention.

A webhook is a user-defined HTTP call to an external system invoked as a way to feed data from your application or platform to an external system based on some event. The Connect iPaaS Webook Trigger acts as an external system allowing you to receive real-time notifications when defining those events of interest. Unlike Polling Triggers that periodically check for the event, webhooks are pushed from your platform making an outbound call to Connect iPaaS that will receive the notification for your defined trigger. The benefit of a webhook over polling is, it enables immediate notification upon creation or update of records of interest.

• The Connect iPaaS platform can make API calls to automatically register webhook URLs to some applications and platforms such as ServiceNow.
• However, some platforms including Salesforce require you to manually register the provided webhook endpoint URL as shown in the image below.

Figure 1. Setting Up a Manual webhook in Salesforce

What is Polling?

Polling trigger periodically checks for the desired changes in the target application. The interval is decided by the user during the time of setting up of the trigger in their workflow.

For example, in Salesforce Create Object (Object: Contact), if you select the polling interval to be 10 minutes, every 10 minutes Connect iPaaS will check for the new contacts created in Salesforce.

There are 2 types of polling, Fixed Interval and Bulk Scheduled.

Fixed Interval Polling

• Fixed Interval polling checks for the desired changes periodically at a selected interval as shown in the image below. For example, if a 30-minute polling interval is chosen, all updated Contact records in Salesforce upon detection within that interval will be processed individually, once per record.

For example, if you create a workflow using Salesforce Object Updated with 5 new contacts created in the last 30 minutes as a trigger and Gmail Send email as an action, Connect iPaaS will detect those 5 contacts and 5 emails will be sent via Gmail corresponding to each Contact.

Figure 2. Define the polling interval

Bulk Scheduled Polling

Bulk Scheduled polling supports the listening of records executed at a selected fixed start time and re-occurring at an interval (i.e. Monthly, weekly, or daily) as shown in the image below. The resulting output is generated as a file report in CSV or any delimited format. The file will contain selected fields of all records that were created or updated within the selected interval. The Output file can be formatted using any delimiter of choice.

Steps required to set up a Bulk Scheduled Polling:

1. Select a Polling Interval from the following options.

   • 30 Minutes
   • 1 Hour
   • 6 Hours
   • 1 Day
   • 1 Week
   • 1 Month

2. Select a start date and time for polling using the date-time selector as shown in Figure 3.

   • If the chosen start time is in the future, the polling job will not begin until that date, re-occurring at the specified interval.

   • The selected date can also be in the past allowing you to retrieve records previously created or updated in the system. For example, if you wish to poll for all updated contacts in Salesforce from January 1, the contacts included in the report will include all those contacts updated from January 1 until now.

   NOTE This may result in an excessively large amount of data to be processed and may exceed the retrievable size limit allowed by the particular platform.

3. Choose the desired fields to be included in the CSV report. If no field is selected, all fields will be included in the report.

4. Select a delimiter to separate the values of each field in the output report. You can go with comma which is the standard separator, or you can select any delimiter from the list.

   • Comma
   • Colon
   • Semicolon
   • Space
   • Tab
   • Custom

Figure 3. Bulk Polling Setup

• Once the CSV file is ready, it can be sent downstream to the action microservice. Since the action application must have the capacity to handle a file input, currently you can select the following action applications.

Figure 4. Action Applications Supported with Bulk Polling Trigger

Event Filter

Connect iPaaS enables you to select specific events and filter out the rest using certain attributes of the incoming trigger event. This ability allows selective processing of the events of interest.

By clicking on the Add Filter button, you can select the attributes of the trigger event based on which you want to filter. You can select the operations that you want to perform for filtering out events. You can construct complex logic of AND and OR conditions to select the desired events. You can also add/remove the filtering rule by clicking on the + or - buttons next to each rule.

Figure 5. Button for Adding Event Filter

Figure 6. Set up Event Filter