Creating categories to organize triggers

Fastpath: Admin > Business Rules > Triggers

Trigger categories allow you to visually group triggers and make it easier for you to organize and manage your triggers. This article describes how admins and agents with business rules permissions can create trigger categories.

This article includes the following sections:

• About trigger categories
• Creating trigger categories
• Organizing triggers within categories
• Using the Zendesk API for trigger categories

Related articles:

• Enabling trigger categories
• Managing trigger categories

About trigger categories

By default, new accounts created after Jan 20, 2021, automatically support trigger categories. These accounts include a default category for Notification triggers and you can create additional categories as needed. If you have an existing account, you can choose to enable trigger categories for your account. See Enabling trigger categories.

To help you manage triggers in your account, you can add additional trigger categories. Trigger categories enable you to arrange triggers into groups or collections based on trigger functions or other criteria. This feature is particularly useful for accounts that have a large number of triggers. You can expand or collapse the categories to show or hide triggers in each collection.

When you decide how to group your triggers into categories, keep in mind that the order you set for trigger categories must match the order in which you want triggers to run. Run order will have a big impact on how you decide to create and organize triggers within categories. For example, in the illustration above, all triggers in the Email Triggers category run before any triggers in the API Triggers category. For more information, see Understanding when triggers run and fire.

Creating trigger categories

You can create new trigger categories and add triggers to them.

To create a trigger category

1. Click the Admin icon () in the sidebar, then select Business Rules > Triggers.

   The triggers list appears.

2. Open the Add trigger drop-down menu at the top of the Triggers page and select Add category.

   

3. Enter a name for the category and click Add.

   

   A new category appears at the bottom of the triggers list. You can create new triggers and add them to the category, or move existing triggers to the category.
4. To create a new trigger and add it to the category, click +Add trigger in the category.

   

   For details on adding triggers, see Creating triggers for automatic ticket updates and notifications.

5. To move an existing trigger to the category, edit the trigger, then in the trigger definition, select the new category you created from the Category drop-down menu.

   

   You can also reorder triggers using drag-and-drop to move triggers between categories.

Organizing triggers within categories

Once you have added trigger categories, you can do the following to organize triggers within categories:

• To set the order of triggers within a category, see Reordering and sorting triggers.
• To move triggers from one category to another, you can:
  • • Drag-and-drop one or more triggers between categories. For more information on how to drag-and-drop triggers, see Reordering triggers.
    • Edit the trigger and select a new Category for the trigger. 
• To add a new trigger to a specific location in the triggers list, click the options menu icon () next to a trigger, then choose Add trigger below from the menu.

  

• To delete a trigger from a category, see Deleting and deactivating triggers.

Using the Zendesk API for trigger categories

Once you are using trigger categories, you can designate a category when creating a new trigger via the Zendesk API. If you don’t specify a category when creating a new trigger, Zendesk will select a category for you. You’ll also be able to make changes to trigger categories themselves through the API. See our API documentation.