Event Router Pattern
Centralized handling of all events, routed to the appropriate skill by pre-defined criteria.
Why This Pattern
Every new event source without a router means a new bespoke integration path. Centralizing intake is a one-time cost you pay so that adding the fifth, sixth, and tenth source doesn't mean building a fifth, sixth, and tenth way of getting an event to the right skill. It only pays off when the number of sources is genuinely going to grow — for one or two sources, the router is overhead you didn't need.
This pattern is for events initiated by systems. A user mid-conversation who needs a different genie is a different problem with different governance costs (permission awareness, login friction) — that's Genie Handover, below.
When to Use It
- Multiple external sources or subscribers generate events that all need centralized handling.
- Routing decisions can be made against pre-determined criteria rather than open-ended reasoning.
When NOT to Use It
- The request needs open-ended, conversational classification with no clear source events.
- A live conversation needs to move to a different genie mid-thread — that's Genie Handover, not Event Router.
How It Works in Workato
Process incoming events from external apps or skills. Centrally manage them through data tables, or route them directly to app events to decide the next skill to call, based on pre-determined criteria.
Mid-conversation routing: Genie Handover
Genie Handover carries real, documented limitations that shape when it's worth using: the list of available genies has to be manually maintained, each with a description; the handover module doesn't know the user's permissions for the destination genie; and users may need to log into other Slack applications unless pre-loaded from the backend. Those costs are the actual reason to prefer Orchestrator-Worker (keeping the user on one thread) whenever the conversation doesn't strictly need to move.
Source: Workato Docs: Genie design patterns · Agentic Design Cookbook V2.0, pp. 12–13 · Agentic Development Cookbook V2.0, p. 37 (Genie Handover)