Background information: Application Event System

In its most basic form, the application event system consists of these interrelated components:

• Events are uniquely named incidents that can be triggered during the use of an application. Events can have multiple triggers and can be fired by user actions, conditions in a database, other events, or other situations.
• Event handlers are software routines and data that determine how the system should respond when the associated event is triggered. Each event can have multiple handlers but each handler can be associated with only one event. Each event handler consists of one or more event actions.
• Event actions are the individual tasks or bits of work that are performed by the event handler. Each event handler can have multiple actions.

For example, suppose you have a sales manager who wants to be notified whenever someone adds a new customer to the system. You could use the application event system to set up an event that fires whenever anyone adds a new customer into the system, and use event handlers and actions to automatically generate a notification that is sent to the sales manager.

Events and event handlers are defined for an application database. If you want an event handler to run only at certain sites in a multi-site application database, use the Applies To Sites field to specify the sites.

For more information about how the event components work together, see the Application Event System section in the Developer online help.