March Feature Roundup: Q-Flow CLI, Schema Validation, Smart Event Routing & OpenAPI Imports

March 2025: New Q-Flow Features

We’re back with another feature-packed release! March’s updates are all about developer empowerment, data integrity, and intelligent event routing. Whether you’re a hands-on engineer working from the terminal, or an architect designing multi-tenant workflows at scale, Q-Flow is now even more powerful, intuitive, and standards-aligned.

Here’s what’s new:

1. Q-Flow CLI

What It Is

We’ve released the Q-Flow CLI—a cross-platform command-line tool for managing your Q-Flow environments and configurations directly from your terminal. Whether you're on macOS, Linux, or Windows, the CLI lets you rapidly build, test, and deploy notification workflows with the same precision as the Q-Flow UI.

Why It Matters

- Automate Everything: Perfect for CI/CD pipelines or large-scale configuration management.

- Bulk Operations: Add, update, or remove Subscribers and Subscriptions in batches.

- Developer-Friendly: Helps developers rapidly test configurations or inspect event set-ups directly from the terminal.

Key Capabilities

The CLI supports the full suite of management operations, including:

login – Authenticate using your Qala credentials
config – Set environment variables and automation options
environment – Create and manage Q-Flow Environments
events – View, inspect and import Event Registry definitions
topics – Create, update, and remove Topics
sources – Manage Sources and incoming webhooks
subscriptions – Create, update, and delete subscriptions.
subscriber-groups – Create, update and delete subscriber-groups.

📚 Qala CLI Documentation

📖Full Command Reference

2. Environment Schema Validations

What It Is

Q-Flow now allows you to enforce strict event schema validation at the Environment level. This ensures that only well-formed events, which conform to predefined JSON schemas, are allowed to enter your Topics and Subscriptions.

Why It Matters

- Protect Your Data Pipeline: Stop malformed events before they cause downstream disruptions.

- Simplify Debugging: Get clear, actionable error messages when validation fails.

- Balance Flexibility & Control: Enable strict validation in production and more relaxed validation in development or staging environments.

How It Works

Enable Schema Validation within your Environment settings.
Events published to any Topic/Environment must conform to the schema defined in the Event Registry.
If the payload does not match the expected structure, it’s rejected with a 400 Bad Request, providing the details as to why it failed validation.

Example Validation Error

1{ 
2 "type": "https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7231#section-6.5.1", 
3 "title": "bad request", 
4 "status": 400, 
5 "instance": "/v1/topics/schema_validation/events/publish", 
6 "traceId": "0hna7js35dfv8:00000001", 
7 "errors": [ 
8 { 
9 "name": "events", 
10 "reason": "event content for event type' customer.created' 
11   failed schema validation: /deactivated: value is \ "string\" but should be \" boolean\"." 
12 } 
13 ] 
14}

This protects against silent data corruption and misalignment across services. Find out more here about Environment Schema validation.

3. Refined Publish Endpoint

What It Is

We’ve updated our Publish Topic Event API to make it more streamlined and intuitive. Previously, event publishing required an unnecessary array wrapper. That’s now gone—publishing is simpler and faster.

What’s New

- Removed the events[] wrapper—just send one clean event object

- Requires only event type, data with audience and event ID being optional

- More prescriptive and detailed validations

- Now supports audience-based routing (see Features 5 & 6)

Why It Matters

By simplifying the input structure and making validation feedback clearer, teams can reduce integration errors and publish events more confidently.

4. Developer Documentation Refresh

What It Is

We’ve overhauled the Q-Flow Developer Documentation to make it friendlier, more engaging, and easier to navigate—especially for first-time users or less technical stakeholders.

What’s Improved

🎬Walkthrough GIFs & videos to demonstrate key flows

📚Detailed guides for Topics, Sources, Subscriptions, and more

🧠Tooltips and in-context explanations for technical terms and fields

🌐Unified search and deep-linking to quickly jump into relevant sections

🔗 Start with the Quick Start Guide

Whether you’re implementing Q-Flow for the first time or fine-tuning a live environment, the new documents provide faster answers and better learning pathways. As always, we love feedback. Let us know what you think of the new Developer Documentation.

5. Environment-Level Publish Endpoint

What It Is

A new /v1/events/publish endpoint allows developers to publish events without specifying a Topic. Instead, Q-Flow will automatically route each event to the correct Topics and Subscriptions based on the event type and audience scope.

Why It Matters

- Simplified Publishing: No need to manage Topic-specific endpoints.

- Smart Routing: Events are automatically matched to where they must go.

- Multi-Tenant Safe: Built-in audience filters ensure events are only delivered to the correct tenant.

- Schema-Backed: Events are validated against the Environment’s schema registry.

Routing Logic Example

1{
2  "type": "payment.authorized",
3  "audiences": ["ACME01"],
4  "data": {
5    "transactionId": "987654321",
6    "amount": {
7      "currency": "USD",
8      "value": 600.00
9    },
10    "status": "authorized"
11  }
12}

✅ Routed to any Topic that accepts payment.authorized

✅ Delivered to Subscriptions that filter by audience "ACME01"

❌ Ignored by Subscriptions without a matching audience or event type

This makes your integration logic cleaner and more secure—ideal for platforms serving multiple customers or use cases.

6. Subscription Scope Filtering

What It Is

Subscription Scope Filtering lets you restrict which events a Subscriber receives based on the 'audiences' field in an event. You can now define this filter on both individual Subscriptions and Subscriber Groups.

Why It Matters

- Supports multi-tenancy at scale

- Ensures Subscribers only receive what’s relevant

- Prevents cross-tenant data leaks

How It Works

- When an event is published with an ‘audiences’ array, Q-Flow compares each audience value to the Subscription’s Scope Filter.

- Only if there’s a match does the Subscription receive the event.

Find out more:

Subscription Scope Filter

Subscriber Group Scope Filter

Example

Subscription:

1{
2  "name": "ACME",
3  "audience": "ACME"
4}

Event:

1{
2  "type": "payment.authorized",
3  "audiences": ["ACME"],
4  "data": {
5    "transactionId": "987654321",
6    "amount": {
7      "currency": "USD",
8      "value": 600.00
9    },
10    "status": "authorized"
11  }
12}

✅ Delivered to the ACME Subscription

❌ If the audience were "TenantXYZ", the event would not be delivered

Important Note

Subscriptions created via the Embeddable Component will automatically inherit their Scope Filter from the Subscriber Group and cannot override it—this helps ensure tenant safety in embedded or customer-facing UIs.

7. OpenAPI Event Import

What It Is

We now support OpenAPI 3.0 and 3.1 YAML file imports via both the Q-Flow UI and CLI. This allows you to automatically generate Event Types and organize them into categories based on your existing API specifications.

Why It Matters

- Accelerates Onboarding: No need to create events manually

- Improves Accuracy: Uses OpenAPI definitions to reduce human error

- Supports Scale: Ideal for large teams or platforms with extensive event catalogs

- Standards-Based: Aligns with OpenAPI and Event-Driven Architecture best practices

How It Works

Import your OpenAPI spec via the UI or CLI
Q-Flow parses your definitions and auto-creates Events, Categories, and schemas

This is perfect for organizations that already maintain a contract-first approach or are transitioning to event-driven architectures at scale.