The CargoWise Milestone Completed. The Message Never Fired.

CargoWise does not send outbound messages because a shipment changed. It sends them because a workflow milestone completed and that milestone carries an explicit instruction to send.

From Complect's documentation of the platform: "Workflow Templates will require a Completion Trigger Action adding for any Milestones or Triggers that are required to send eAdaptor outbound messages."

Without that trigger action, the milestone completes — visibly, successfully, green tick and all — and no message fires. Nothing errors. Nothing logs. Your integration simply never hears about events it was built to consume.

This is the most dangerous failure mode in the outbound pipeline precisely because it isn't a failure. Every component you own is healthy. The message was never born. When a downstream team reports missing data, check trigger configuration before debugging a single line of your own code — the field data says missing or misconfigured workflow triggers are the most common reason for visibility gaps.

XUE or XUS: send the right size of message

Each trigger sends one of two message types. The one-line rule: XUE (UniversalEvent) carries minimal data — a record ID plus the event — use it when the consumer only needs to know something happened. XUS (UniversalShipment) carries full shipment details — use it when the consumer needs the data. XUE is smaller and faster; a visibility platform subscribed to full XUS payloads for every status twitch is paying full-shipment freight for a one-bit fact.

The trigger map

The sourced recommendation: create a comprehensive trigger map before configuring anything — which milestones fire which messages to which systems — and review it whenever an integration or workflow changes. Example rows:

In production the map needs more columns — owner, tested-in-non-prod date, dedupe notes — because a trigger map is not documentation, it's an operational register. Two hygiene rules with it: test every milestone-trigger combination in a non-production environment (wrong-time triggers cause duplicate messages or premature notifications), and centralise trigger management so two teams don't wire the same milestone twice.

Chapter 4 of eAdapter in Production covers the full workflow model, duplicate-trigger governance, and ships a blank trigger-map worksheet with the book. Get Vol 2 →