Choose the right trigger type for each workflow — inbound webhooks for real-time events, cron schedules for recurring jobs, and platform events for cross-workflow fan-out.
The Role of a Trigger
A trigger is the starting gun for every workflow. Nothing in a Cotonity automation runs until its trigger fires. Choosing the right trigger type is therefore the most consequential decision you make when designing a workflow, because it determines the freshness of your data, the latency between an event and your response, and the overall load the automation places on your infrastructure. Cotonity supports three first-class trigger types: inbound webhooks, which start a workflow when an external system sends an HTTP POST request; cron schedules, which start a workflow on a calendar-based cadence; and platform events, which start a workflow in response to something that happened inside Cotonity itself, such as an agent completing a task.
Inbound Webhooks
When you choose the Webhook trigger, Cotonity generates a unique HTTPS endpoint for your workflow. Any external system — your website, a form tool, a payment processor, or a custom backend — can POST a JSON payload to that URL. The workflow receives the payload as its initial data context, making every field available to downstream steps via the data mapping editor. Webhook triggers are ideal for real-time, event-driven automations where another system is the source of truth for when something happened. You can optionally add a shared secret to validate the signature on incoming requests, ensuring only authorized senders can trigger your workflow. Test your webhook directly from the trigger settings panel using the built-in payload simulator.
Cron Schedules
The Schedule trigger uses standard cron syntax to define when the workflow should run. Common patterns include every hour ('0 * * * *'), every weekday at 9 AM in your timezone ('0 9 * * 1-5'), or the first day of every month ('0 0 1 * *'). Cotonity's scheduler is timezone-aware — always set the timezone explicitly to avoid surprises around daylight saving transitions. Schedule triggers are best suited for batch operations: pulling a report, sending a weekly digest email, archiving old records, or syncing data between two systems on a fixed cadence. Because they fire on a predictable interval rather than in response to an event, scheduled workflows typically do not receive an input payload; instead, their first step fetches the data they need.
Platform Events
Platform event triggers let one part of Cotonity react to another. When an AI agent finishes processing a document, when a workflow in another branch fails, or when a new connection is added to your workspace, Cotonity can publish a structured event that other workflows subscribe to. This decoupling is powerful: your core document-processing workflow does not need to know that a downstream notification workflow exists. You simply publish an event and any number of subscribers respond independently. Platform events also enable fan-out patterns, where a single trigger causes multiple parallel workflows to start simultaneously. To subscribe to an event, select Platform Event as the trigger type and choose the event name from the dropdown list of events that your workspace currently publishes.