Publishers

A publisher is the primary source of events within a system. They generate events when an action or change occurs in an application in which the targets are interested. Publishers are usually scalable to handle high volumes of event generation, and it can either be any Zoho or other external SAAS products.

Here are a couple of examples for Publishers:

• A ride-sharing mobile application serves as a Publisher, generating and emitting events whenever a driver is assigned to notify the user.
• Zoho Inventory acts as a Publisher, emitting events whenever there is an update to the inventory list to change the stock count in an e-commerce platform.

Publishers play a crucial role in enabling real-time event processing and event-driven workflows within targeted systems.

Key Aspects

Default Publishers

Catalyst Signals offers a set of default publishers for ease of use. Additionally, you can also create your own authorized publisher and events in the Catalyst Signals. The default publishers are categorized into two types as follows:

• Zoho Publishers: This comprises all the products of Zoho with a set of default events based on the service provided by the product. Only the Zoho products created using the same ID as the Catalyst can be configured.
• SAAS Publishers: This lists down the SAAS publishers and their events that Catalyst Signals supports by default. It is mandatory to provide the API token of the SAAS product to efficiently transfer the event details within the system.
• Catalyst Publishers: This lists down the Catalyst publishers and their supported events by default. Only the Catalyst Services created for the same project and organization can be configured.

No-Code Schema

Zoho, Catalyst and SaaS publishers in Signals include event schema for each event by default. Even for custom publishers, adding just the event payload will auto-generate the schema for the custom events.

You can manually add the event payload or use the Live Event Payload option to capture it from an API call. Customizing an existing schema is also easy with just JSON path in Signals. Event Transformation guide

Event Ordering

Event Ordering ensures that events are delivered to the target in the same order they were received from the publisher. This is particularly useful for workflows that rely on sequential event processing. This feature works across all publisher types - Zoho, SaaS, Catalyst and Custom.

When event ordering is enabled, Signals maintains the sequence of events as long as each one is successfully delivered on the first attempt. If an event fails and enters the Dropped status, it will be retried according to the configured retry policy. Subsequent events will still be delivered in the order they were received.

To learn more about retry handling and event statuses, see the Retry Policy and Event Statuses help page.