Building workflows
The rules a workflow graph must follow, the order branches run in, how drafts keep unfinished work, and what happens when automations trigger each other.
Structure rules
A workflow flows outward from exactly one trigger (which has no incoming connection) and must contain no cycle and no disconnected node.
Each output — a condition's True and False, a chat message's choices, the single output of every other node — can feed any number of connections. Only an exact duplicate (the same output connected twice to the same node) is refused.
The one ordering rule: nothing can point back into the trigger. Conditions and actions can otherwise connect in any order, including an action followed by a condition that tests what it produced.
Branch order
When an output fans out to several branches, the branches run one after the other, from top to bottom as their nodes are laid out on the canvas (at equal height, left to right). Move a branch's first node above its sibling to run that branch first.
- A branch finishes completely before the next one starts.
- Everything a branch produced is available to the branches that run after it.
- Two branches may re-converge on a shared downstream node. It then runs once per branch that reaches it.
Example — a condition's True output feeds both Assign to a user and a Discord notification sent to the assigned team members. Recipients are resolved when the node runs, so placing the assignment above the notification is what makes the newly assigned member receive it.
Drafts
Your work is never lost to a validation error. When you save a workflow that isn't complete — no trigger yet, a node left unconfigured, no action, or any other structural problem — it is saved as a draft rather than rejected.
A draft keeps everything you built exactly as it is, shows a Draft badge in the list, and never runs. The editor lists what's left to finish so you know how to publish it.
Enabling a workflow (turning it on) requires a fully valid graph, and that check runs both in the editor and on the server: a draft cannot be enabled until it's complete. If you edit an enabled workflow in a way that makes it invalid, it drops back to a draft (and stops running) instead of staying live but broken — so a workflow that is on is always one that actually works.
Automations can trigger each other
An action can set off other workflows: a message a workflow posts, or a status it changes, is an event just like any other, so a workflow that reacts to it will run. This lets you compose behavior across workflows — for example, On status changed → Post message, then On chat message → … reacting to that message.
To keep a chain from running forever, everything set off by one original event runs as a single chain, watched by three safeguards:
| Safeguard | Limit |
|---|---|
| Identical step repeated in a chain | Stopped the second time |
| Actions in one chain | 100 |
| Node steps in a single run | 200 |
- A workflow runs at most once per identical step in a chain. A step is the same when the same workflow reacts to the same kind of event with the same meaningful data and performs the same actions. If a chain would repeat that exact step (the classic A → B → A loop), it is stopped instead. A workflow reacting to genuinely different data — for example the ticket moving to a different status later in the chain — is a legitimate new step and still runs.
- A chain can run at most 100 actions in total. This also bounds a chain whose data keeps changing every step (which the repeat check cannot catch): it is stopped when it reaches the limit.
- A single run can execute at most 200 node steps. Branching out and re-converging multiplies the paths through a workflow, so one run's total work is capped too.
A stopped step is recorded in the run history as Loop stopped, with the reason, so you can spot and fix a workflow that loops. Nothing is lost: the steps that ran before the safeguard tripped still took effect.
One case still does not start a chain: a closure requested from the portal never triggers workflows, so nothing an automation does can be set off by it.