Benefits

1. Orchestrate and Automate Tasks
   

Catalyst circuits are highly beneficial in automating major portions of your application logic in elaborately designed workflows. The circuit triggers each configured state automatically, passes customized data to the states based on its configuration, handles the flow of application logic at every step, performs error handling and more. Your Catalyst application therefore executes in order as you orchestrate it. You can coordinate various individual components of your microservice to work together as you need, and enable collaboration between them.

2. Configure Complex Workflows Easily
   

The business requirements and workflows of a Catalyst application are translated into flow diagrams that are easy to comprehend and work on. The flow diagram of a circuit provides a quick glance over the application logic and helps you visualize it as a series of steps. It enables you to understand the circuit’s flow without efforts, detect problem areas, modify its elements, arrange states or easily remove them without even writing code. Catalyst Circuits enhances your application design and evolves it as well-structured and organized.

3. Diagnose Errors and View Detailed Logs
   

The error handling functionality in a circuit, combined with compilation errors feature and detailed logs, enable you to easily diagnose and debug problems in the workflow. You can define custom actions to be taken during errors in the function, batch, and circuit states. This enables Catalyst to manage errors like execution timeouts and failure, and authorization failure automatically. Catalyst also displays compilation errors in a circuit’s configuration before you even execute it. The detailed logs of each execution also provide the status of each state’s task execution, the payload and parameters passed, and the responses and exceptions generated. You can also refer to Catalyst Logs for individual function logs.

4. Write Less Code
   

Catalyst offloads responsibilities from Catalyst Basic I/O functions by implementing functionalities like conditional branching, delays, passing custom input, parallel execution, batch processing separately in circuits. This ensures that you build multi-step, feature-rich applications easily, by preventing you from writing extra or repeated code. You can assign repeatable actions and patterns in a circuit, orchestrate it according to your needs, and automate the execution of the circuit and all its task processes with less code.

5. Execute Circuits from the Console
   

You can execute circuits from the console to test its flow and verify the generated output. This feature allows you to provide different input JSON data for different test cases, view the circuit’s processing in the flow diagram, and check reports of each state’s execution and response, and more. Based on the results generated, you can easily reorganize or swap states, rearrange the steps, provide different inputs, and perform tests for different conditions to achieve desired outcomes. You can then implement the circuit in your application after you finalize its workflow design.