Understanding Triggers - Initiating Processes and Workflows

All processes must begin at some point: a trigger is what defines when a workflow should start, ensuring that tasks are executed at the right time and under the right conditions. Within Blackbird, there are four types of triggers: manual, scheduled, event-based and polling. Each type serves a unique purpose and is suited to different scenarios.

Manual Triggers

Manual triggers (also referred to as Manual push) are activated by human intervention. These workflows start as soon as someone clicks the Fly button. This type of trigger is ideal for testing and debugging, or when processes need to be started based on specific, often unpredictable, conditions that require human judgment. This is the recommended trigger type while you are in the process of building your Birds.

Key Features:

Human Initiation: Requires a person to start the process. Flexibility: Allows for discretion and judgment in starting processes. Use Cases: Testing workflows, ad-hoc task initiation.

Scheduled Triggers

Scheduled triggers are time-based and initiate processes at predefined intervals. These triggers are perfect for tasks that need to be performed regularly and consistently, such as daily data backups or monthly financial reports. By automating the initiation of these tasks, scheduled triggers ensure that processes are executed punctually without requiring manual intervention.

In Blackbird, you can choose an interval—from the moment the Bird is published, every X amount of hours or minutes the Bird will be triggered. Another option is to start the process daily at a specific time, or always on a set day of the week/month. Additionally, you can specify a timezone to avoid any confusion.

Prevent overlapping flights

If a scheduled Bird takes longer to finish than its trigger interval, another Flight may start while the previous one is still running, potentially creating duplicates, repeating work or consuming tokens.

To prevent this, add the Search other active flights action at the beginning of the Bird. Add End Flight immediately after it and set its condition to Has other flights Equal True. If another Flight is active, the new Flight ends before any following actions.

How minute intervals are scheduled

Minute-based schedules are based on CRON, the standard system used to schedule recurring tasks. CRON schedules use the clock rather than a continuously running timer. When you publish a Bird, Blackbird creates the schedule using the minute at which it was published. The pattern then repeats within each hour.

This matters when the selected interval does not divide evenly into 60 minutes. The interval is followed within an hour, then the pattern starts again in the next hour. As a result, one gap between runs can be shorter than the selected interval. This is expected CRON scheduling behaviour, not a duplicate trigger or a repeated flight.

For example, if a Bird is published at 12:35 with an Every 11 minutes schedule, it can run at 12:35, 12:46, 12:57, 13:08, 13:19, 13:30, and then 13:35. The final gap is 5 minutes, after which the clock-based pattern repeats each hour.

For intervals that are consistent within the hour, choose a number that divides evenly into 60: 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, 30, or 60 minutes. For example, 5, 10, 15, and 30-minute schedules have no shortened gap at the hour boundary. Blackbird does not currently provide a pure elapsed-time schedule for uneven values such as 11, 25, or 59 minutes.

Key Features:

Time-Based: Initiates processes at specific times or intervals. Consistency: Ensures regular and timely execution of tasks without human intevention. Use Cases: Periodic reporting, routine data processing, pulling content out of my CMS every Monday at the agreed cutoff time to send it for translation.

Event Triggers

Event-based triggers respond to specific changes in an app by using webhooks or callbacks. These triggers are highly dynamic and are activated by defined conditions such as the arrival of a new email, the completion of a task, or changes in data. Event-based triggers are essential for real-time processing and responsive workflows, where the initiation of processes needs to be immediate and contingent on specific events.

Once you select the Event type, move to the Connection tab or click Continue, choose the App you want to react to, and the specific type of event (e.g., a task being completed in my TMS, a new email in Outlook, a new order created in Plunet). After publishing the Bird, once the selected event occurs, your Bird will react to the event and start flying.

Some integrations process their webhooks asynchronously. For you, setup and use of these event triggers is the same: Blackbird accepts the notification first and then queues it for processing. This allows the integration to handle busy periods more reliably; a Flight may begin shortly after the event rather than during the sender’s webhook request. Exactly which Apps support asynchronous webhooks you can view on the individual App pages.

Some of these integrations also need to verify the event endpoint once before notifications can begin. Blackbird completes this verification automatically, then handles later events through the same queue. No additional setup is required in your Bird.

Blackbird also checks active webhook subscriptions every 24 hours. If an App reports that a subscription is no longer working, Blackbird suspends the affected Bird and adds a Bird deactivated entry to its log and notifications, including the reason provided by the App.

In the image below, we can choose to react to a number of different events happening in Zendesk, for instance, a new article being published.

In case any extra setting is needed (some apps require this), you may see an URL that needs to be copy-pasted somewhere. In such scenarios, details will be specified in the app’s section within Blackbird documentation.

Key Features:

Event-Driven: Activated by specific system events or changes. Responsiveness: Enables real-time reaction to events. Use Cases: Real-time data updates, automated notifications, conditional task execution.

Events with multiple items

Some Apps find or receive several items in one event, for example when they poll for changes or send a batch of updates. When such an event is used as a Bird trigger, Blackbird starts a separate Flight for every item. If the event has no items, it starts no Flights. This keeps each item independent, just as if the App had sent them one at a time.

When the same event is used as a Checkpoint, its items stay together as a list. You can use that list in a loop or pass it to a later action.

Bucketing

Sometimes, reacting every single time something happens can create clutter as these actions occur too frequently. This is where Bucketing comes into play. You can adjust your Bird so that Blackbird collects these events and only starts after either X amount of actions have taken place or a set time has elapsed. Add your settings to the Bucketing tab for this.

In the image below, following the previous example, we don’t want to create a new TMS project each time an article is published in Zendesk. Instead, we wait until at least five articles are published or two hours have passed, whichever happens first. If after two hours only three articles were published, the Bird will execute anyway and create a new TMS project for those three articles. This adjustment ensures that processes are responsive enough without creating excessive noise.

For an event that returns multiple items, Blackbird determines the individual Flights first. Bucketing then counts those Flights, not the number of webhook notifications or polling responses. For example, one notification containing five items contributes five Flights to the bucket.

Polling

Since some systems don’t have webhooks or callbacks, but we would still like to be diligent and reactive, Blackbird has launched Polling events. For the regular user, this trigger looks exactly like an event-based one, while, under the hood, Blackbird is checking for changes at specified intervals. This type of scheduled trigger looks for updates in an app’s data to decide whether to start a workflow, bridging the gap for apps that don’t provide webhooks by allowing our Birds to react in real time.

Checkpoints

This innovative feature enables in-Bird triggers, allowing your Bird to wait for a specific event to occur before moving on to the subsequent steps. Find more information about Checkpoints in a dedicated entry here.