An automation is a set of steps Pyron carries out for you when something happens. It might email a manager the moment a high-priority entry is logged, put together a report every Monday morning, or attach a lifecycle to each new entry that matches a rule. You set one up once, and it runs on its own from then on.
What an automation is
An automation is built as a flow graph: a diagram of steps wired together. Each step does one job — send an email, look up some entries, create an entry — and arrows carry values from one step into the next. Every automation starts from a single trigger and works through the connected steps in order.
An administrator builds and turns on automations from the flow-graph area. A saved automation can sit as a draft while it is still being worked on; only once it is turned on does it start watching for its trigger and running. It can also be paused, which stops it from firing without deleting any of its steps. For how one is put together, see Building a flow graph.
A draft or paused automation never fires, no matter what happens in Pyron. If something you expect to happen automatically is not happening, the first thing to check is whether its automation is turned on.
Triggers: events, schedules and buttons
Every automation begins with a trigger — the thing that sets it off. There are a few common kinds:
- An event. Something happening in Pyron, such as an entry being logged or a lifecycle action being taken. An event trigger can be narrowed with a condition, so the automation runs only when the event matches — for example, only when an entry's priority is high.
- A schedule. A set time, such as every morning at nine, every Monday, or the first of each month. Scheduled automations run in your organisation's timezone.
- A button. Someone presses a button to run the automation on demand, rather than waiting for an event or a set time.
An automation can also be started by a lifecycle action, or by an incoming web request from another system. Each automation has exactly one trigger; the trigger decides both when it runs and what starting details it has to work with. For the full set of triggers and how they are configured, see Triggers.
What automations can do
Each step in an automation is an action drawn from a shared catalogue. Common ones let an automation:
- Create or update an entry.
- Send an email.
- Generate a report and send it on.
- Attach a lifecycle to an entry that matches a rule, so it lands in its starting state automatically (see Attaching a lifecycle automatically).
- Work through a list of entries one at a time, doing the same steps for each.
- Take a different path depending on a condition, so one automation can handle several cases.
Steps chain together: what one step produces becomes the input to the next, which is how an automation can, say, find the right entries, loop over them, and email a summary. For everything a step can do, see Actions.
Watching them run
Each time an automation fires, Pyron keeps its run history: when it started and finished, whether it finished or failed, and what each step produced along the way. You can open that history to see exactly what happened on any given run.
A run is marked as it goes — in progress while it works, completed when every step finishes, or failed if a step raises an error that nothing handles. For an automation that works through a list, the history also shows how many items were processed, how many succeeded and how many failed, so a run that stumbles on one entry can still finish the rest. When a run fails, the error is kept alongside it, so an administrator can see what went wrong and fix it.
For how to read and work with these runs, see Run history.