Basics

In Dreamlit, your workflow is a visual sequence of steps that runs whenever a triggering event occurs. These steps are chained together to process or transform data, orchestrate logic, and ultimately send out notifications.

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Data flow

Each step in the workflow receives data (often a single item, but potentially multiple items). For instance, if your trigger picks up a row from a database table, you’ll get a single row as your initial input. You can then add more steps—like a Data Query—to join or fetch additional data. This means you can configure a single trigger event to fan-out to many (potentially thousands) of notifications, and Dreamlit will handle this for you. Use cases include:

• a comment is added to a post, and you want to notify all other commenters
• a message posted in a groupchat, and you want to notify all members
• an update is made to a listing, and you want to notify all subscribers

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Building a workflow

In the workflow builder UI:

1. Start by selecting a trigger (e.g., a Database Trigger).
2. Add steps (e.g., wait durations, queries, Slack messages, email sends, etc.).

Every change is auto-saved. However, the workflow will not be activated until you click Publish. This means you can safely experiment with updating your workflow steps without worrying about messing with currently running workflows.

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Parallel branches

When you add a step, you can choose to add it either as a descendant or as a branch. Each branch runs in parallel, meaning that a failure in one branch doesn’t block the others. If a node in either branch fails, the other branch will continue to run. You’ll see each branch in the Activity Log.

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Reliability

Dreamlit manages reliability behind the scenes:

• Automatic retries: Each workflow step is retried on transient failures with exponential backoff.
• Idempotent: Steps won’t accidentally run twice for the same item.
• Scalable: Parallel branches can handle large fan-outs of data, running steps in parallel without overloading your application or your database.

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Next steps

That’s the gist of building workflows in Dreamlit! Once you feel comfortable with the basics,