Using custom events

Most checklist items complete based on what users do visibly in your app, for example by clicking a button. Custom events come in when the thing that should complete the item isn’t a visible action. Maybe a chat widget finished a conversation, a third-party payment tool confirmed a charge, or a video player finished playing. FlowNavi can’t see those directly, but your app can. Emit a custom event when they happen and FlowNavi triggers whatever you’ve wired it to.

When to use a custom event

Use a custom event when the trigger isn’t a visible user action. Common cases:

In the browser:

• An embedded tool finishes something (a chat closes, a video finishes playing, a meeting gets booked)
• Something happens behind the scenes in your app (a payment confirms, a search result loads, a file finishes uploading)
• Your app figures something out from data it already has (a user just hit their plan limit, a setting flips on)

On your server:

• Your backend gets a notification from another tool (payment confirmed, account upgraded)
• A scheduled task runs in the background (a nightly job, a daily check on user activity)
• Another service in your stack tells your backend that something happened

Register the event

Custom events must be registered in the editor before you can emit them. Each event has a name your code references.

Event names must be 1–100 characters and use letters, numbers, underscores, or hyphens (regex: ^[a-zA-Z0-9_-]+$). Names are case-sensitive: Trial_Started and trial_started are different events.

Emit a custom event in the browser

Once registered, emit the event from your frontend code by passing its name to emitEvent:

window.FlowNavi.emitEvent("trial_started");

Emit a custom event on the server

To emit events from your backend, send a POST request directly to the FlowNavi API.

You’ll need your project’s API key from the dashboard.

curl -X POST https://sdk.flownavi.com/api/v1/event \
  -H "Content-Type: text/plain;charset=UTF-8" \
  -d '{
    "apiKey": "YOUR_API_KEY",
    "endUserId": "USER_ID_FROM_YOUR_APP",
    "eventName": "trial_started"
  }'

Firing the same event multiple times for the same user completes matching items only once. Safe for webhook retries.

Endpoint reference

POST https://sdk.flownavi.com/api/v1/event

Headers:

The body is stringified JSON. FlowNavi uses text/plain to skip CORS-preflight in browsers.

Request body:

Responses: