Keeping an eye on runs

You don’t have to sit on the workflow editor to know how a run went. Once a workflow is running, Catalyst surfaces it everywhere you go: a small runs indicator floats at the bottom-right of the app, and when the run finishes you get a notification — wherever you happen to be.

This matters for two cases the editor alone can’t cover: a run you started and then navigated away from, and a scheduled or background run that nobody is watching. Both stay visible, and both still tell you the outcome.

The floating indicator

Whenever one or more of your runs is in progress, a small pill appears at the bottom-right corner of the app, on any page. It shows a spinner and a count — “1 workflow” while a single run is going, “3 workflows” when several are. When nothing is running, it’s not there.

It updates in real time. You don’t refresh the page — runs appear, tick along, and clear themselves as they finish.

The runs panel

Click the indicator to expand it into a Workflow runs panel. The panel lists your active runs along with recently-finished ones, so you get the whole recent picture at a glance. Each row shows:

• A status icon — a spinner for running, a green check for completed, a red mark for error, and a muted mark for a cancelled run.
• The workflow’s name.
• Elapsed time — counting up for an active run, frozen at the finish time for one that’s done (for example 42s or 2m 5s).
• For a failure, the error message inline, right there in the row, so you don’t have to open anything to see what went wrong.

Click a row to open that workflow. (Runs launched from inside a mini app are the one exception — see below.)

Finishing notifications

When a run finishes, Catalyst raises a toast notification — even if you’ve long since moved on to something else:

• A success toast when the run completes (titled with the workflow’s name, e.g. “Daily digest completed”).
• A failure toast when it errors, styled to stand out, with the actual error message included. Failures always notify — a quiet failure is the one you most need to catch.

A cancelled run doesn’t toast; you cancelled it, so you already know. And if you’re already sitting on that workflow’s page when it finishes, the toast is skipped — you’re watching it live.

The “View” link

Most finish toasts carry a View link that jumps straight to the workflow, so you can go inspect the run without hunting for it.

Runs started inside an app

When a run is launched from inside a mini app, the toast deliberately leaves out the View link, and its row in the panel won’t navigate away either. You’re using the app — Catalyst keeps you in it rather than yanking you over to the workflow editor. You still get the notification and the outcome; you just stay where you are.

On mobile

On a phone, the floating panel is hidden — mobile is for using Catalyst, not authoring it. But the finish notifications still fire, so a run you kicked off (or a scheduled one) will still tell you when it succeeds or fails.

Tip

Pair this with scheduling and email delivery: a scheduled workflow runs on its own, drops its result in your inbox, and — if anything goes wrong — surfaces the failure to you the next time you open the app.