What is an Event?

What's an event and how does it relate to controls and actions?

Updated over a week ago

The screen's controls are the front end of the screen. They are used to create the user interface. 

And on or more of these controls are waiting for their specific Events so it can perform one or more Actions.

Control, events, and actions. These three are used in conjunction to make app screens respond to a user interacting with it. In this article, we will discuss in detail what an Event is. After that, learn more about actions in our article What is an Action?


What Is an Event?

Imagine a button on the screen:

What is the button doing? Right now, it's doing nothing. The button doesn't do anything on its own. 

All the button is doing, right now, is waiting.

What is it waiting for? You. 

In fact, it's waiting for any user to click it! That's what buttons are for. 

And the process of you clicking the button, the very thing this button is waiting for, is called an Event. (In this particular case, it's the Click Event.) 

Imagine you are waiting for your birthday to come. The birthday is an event and you are waiting for it to occur. For Method, the events it waits for is more mundane. It waits for a user to do something

Now different controls have different events they wait for, but the most common is the Click Event. And once the event has been triggered, then it launches actions to be done as a result of the event.

For example, a button on the screen is waiting for someone to click it. Once it is clicked, it will show a message to the user.

The Click Event triggers actions to occur. In the above image, the Click event triggered the Show message action.

To recap, a control waits for an event to happen, which is usually initiated by the user. Once this event is triggered, one or more actions occur. 

You can find a full list of the events available in Method right here.

To learn more about actions, check our article What is an Action?

Did this answer your question?