Events in Actions

when an action is triggered by an event , charthop makes the event's data available as variables you can use in your trigger conditions and message templates understanding the structure of those variables helps you write precise conditions — especially when you only want an action to fire when a specific field changed event types every event has a type that describes what happened update events follow this format change update \<entity> for example change update hire — a hire record was updated change update job — a job record was updated you can see the event type that fired an action in its run log event before and event update when an update event fires, two variables give you access to the field values involved in that specific change variable what it contains event before \<field> the value of the field before this update event update \<field> the new value being written by this update these variables are scoped to the specific fields touched by this event if a field wasn't part of the update, event update \<field> will be empty example only trigger when startdate changes suppose you have an action on change update hire and want it to fire only when startdate is modified — not when other fields like announcedate are updated use this condition event update date != event before date this checks whether the startdate (stored as date on the event) was part of this update and has a different value than before if startdate wasn't touched, the condition won't match and the action won't fire tip print event values to debug if you're not sure what an event contains, add a send message step that prints the before and after values for example before {{event before date}} after {{event update date}} trigger the event manually, then check the message to see exactly what values charthop captured this is the fastest way to understand what's in the event before writing your condition