What exactly is an Action and an Event? This module will help you fully understand these concepts with a simple - two-card - scenario.
Course Material
What exactly is an Action and an Event? This module will help you fully understand these concepts with a simple - two-card - scenario.
Actions and Events
What exactly is an Action and an Event? To fully understand these concepts we’ll go over a simple scenario and break them down.
Imagine a scenario where:
- You need to interact with whomever mentions your company on Twitter
- You (personally) don’t want to constantly check in on your corporate Twitter feed
- You need a way to notify both you and your team whenever this happens
To do this you’ve decided that you want to get a slack message anytime someone mentions your company on Twitter.
Events
An event is a trigger that starts your Flow. Typically, these triggers are set up to listen for something that happens within an app.
Each connector can have both events and actions.
![](https://d33wubrfki0l68.cloudfront.net/4d46ad7629333a603422b3801f7f9c091f55caf7/fed53/academy/100/103-actions-events/103-twitter-events.png)
In the above image, Twitter has four events. Because each Flow starts with an event, the event card will always be the first card on the left side of a Flow.
Actions
An action occurs after an event and represents the things you can do with a connector. In other words, these are verbs.
Actions can range from sending a message to copying data and working with spreadsheets. Each application can have multiple actions as you can see here Slack has over ten different actions.
![](https://d33wubrfki0l68.cloudfront.net/b9ad588eda879bfe8c1787c29cc53ff7e916341b/7e998/academy/100/103-actions-events/103-slack-actions.png)
Summary
Once you have created an event and an action, you have a working Flow!
![](https://d33wubrfki0l68.cloudfront.net/a2923b28a7cad482b70a649bc8775d127f827fe8/b53dd/academy/100/103-actions-events/103-completed-flo.png)
Again, Flows run from left to right so they are very straightforward to read and understand!