USING WEBHOOKS WITH AIRTABLE & ZAPIER | GAP Consulting

if you are ready to learn a little bit about web hooks look no further than this video i'm going to be using web hooks in tandem with air table and we're going to be building step by step exactly how you can set up a web hook and pass information to it so that you can trigger your automations so if that's of interest stick around and let's get into it [Applause] hey my name is gareth pronovost i am the owner at gap consulting where we help you to organize and automate your business and life if that's of interest and you want to learn more about how we do that do check out our website and don't miss our free airtable crash course it's going to get you up to speed quickly and easily in airtable but without further ado let's jump into my screen here and we are talking about web hooks web hooks work exceptionally well with airtable because we can pass a lot of unique information along so i'm going to be building a web hook here from scratch and it's all about setting up that trigger so really quickly before we get into it you know a lot of times when you go to make a new zap in zapier you will you know already connect to a certain app you'll say hey when this condition is met in this program or whatever the case may be but for us we're going to imagine that we want to build some sort of automation that isn't already supported with a pre-baked trigger so for that web hooks is kind of where it's at now you'll notice that this is a premium feature of zapier so web hooks by zapier are a premium thing but if you're on a paid zapier plan which i strongly recommend you are on then you will have this access so we're going to start by you know selecting that webhooks by zapier as our trigger event and you'll notice that we get three different uh you know selections here now the big two buckets are retrieve pole that's the top one or a catch hook the big difference here a retrieve pole is not an instant zap it's not an instant trigger what a retrieve pole does is it it goes out and it looks every so often at this url depending on your plan it'll look more frequently if you pay more and it goes out and it looks and sees if any new information has been received and if it has been then it does its magic most of the time what we want to do is push a button or somehow initiate that automation and so for this using a catch hook is where it's at the other nice thing about a catch hook is it's instantaneous so as soon as we push that button it triggers this thing to go so i'm going to go ahead and use the catch hook i'm not going to worry about the raw hook this just you know parses out a little bit more stuff that we're not going to need for this so we're going to go with that standard catch hook and continue now what zapier does it automatically creates a unique url for us now this is our web hook our custom web hook url and it is specific to this automation so when you create your own your url is going to be unique obviously for your trigger and then you'll also notice a couple of uh drop downs here we have the ability to either allow this to be caught with an empty body which doesn't usually produce any results for us so we're going to not do that and then we're also going to choose a child key if we so choose in this case i'm going to skip this leave it blank these are not required so really what we do if we copy this url this would be the next step i would do from airtable if we want to initiate this automation from airtable just copy that url go into your database and create a webhook url field and we're going to use a formula field type for this and inside of here either inside double or single quotes you can paste that url once you've created this field every record is going to have this same url so i'm going to make sure to name this webhook url and you'll see that this is going to be of course identical for every record every time we add a record it's automatically going to get that web hook in here now this is really convenient because in the future if you ever choose to change that web hook address you can do that and you only need to come in here and fix this formula to reflect the changes in your address okay so now we can move on with our automation let's take that webhook url again and i'm just going to paste it in here pasting it into my browser and hitting enter you see when i do that it's sending it's initiating this hook and over here if i try to continue i will say test trigger and it's not going to find anything you see it can't find a request and the reason for this is we did not allow it to accept a request with an empty body we actually need to pass some information along with this web hook so let's do that without even messing with airtable yet i'm going to go in here and pass some parameters inside of this web hook so maybe i want to say question mark my name equals and i'll just put gareth here so now if i hit enter first i'm going to copy this so i don't lose it and i'm going to hit enter and it's just gone to this web address right inside of zapier now i can come down and try to catch this hook we're going to test that trigger and there it is it's now found that web hook and you see that it's broken out this parameter it's it's received this data and it's calling it my name and it has the output of gareth and now i can add to this right so let's go in here and i will say ampersand last name equals pronovost right i'll hit enter again and now if i flip back into zapier it should catch whoops i'll need to pull and load in new data here so let's go ahead and load more and it now sees the the most recent of those so now it's been able to parse out two different pieces of data that it received inside of the url so all i'm doing is i'm adding this data i'm tagging it on to the end of this url using this syntax the first piece after the web hook you know so the first chunk here needs to be that web hook right and it ends with the slash after that question mark give the uh give the first parameter a name whatever you're going to call that whatever its id is and then equals and then the parameter or the data that you're that you're passing through then the next part here is an ampersand and then another name or id and then equal sign and then whatever other data you want to pass now this can go indefinitely right i could say uh birth month equals october enter i can continue adding these parameters on at the end here and every new piece of data that i choose to pass will get picked up by that web hook and now we can build whatever we want with our automation so for our example today we actually want to set up a button or a web hook inside of air table so that when we push it then we are going to send a slack message now this may be something that we could have done any number of ways but the web hook is nice and instantaneous and it's going to allow us to set this up much more quickly and easily so let's get to work so i have my webhook url now we need to talk about what data do we need to pass inside of this automation in order for it to do what we want now let's imagine that these parameters that i'm passing right now are exactly what we want to pass so i'll need a first name whoops and we'll make this first name and i will need a last name and of course i will need a birth month uh let's see maybe we'll do this in a single select field so in here i'll put in one person i'll use myself again as an example and really quickly let me drop into my single select field and i'll just create the different months now that i have those i'll get them in the right order and save it and we'll just kind of wrap this up by making this a full name here and i'll use a concatenate formula to combine first and last name and now we're going to fill out some blank data all throughout this uh this table so let's just imagine that we have a couple people in here sadly i don't know when doc holliday was born so sorry about that i'll make this up as i go all right so now we have four people in our database each of them has their own first name each of them has a birth month and we don't even need to necessarily see this webhook url it's going to run in the background when we build out our formula so let's go ahead and hide it for now and what we need to do is adjust that url so that we're adding on these extra pieces of information the first name the last name and the birth month just as we did when we were doing it manually here in by individually typing out these different pieces of data so we need to build a formula that supports this so that it supports each one of our records so let's go ahead and bring up a formula and the best formula for this in my opinion is a concatenate formula and we're going to start with the webhook url now if i stop right here and i save this field you we are going to see just a duplication of that web hook field but i want to add parameters that make each of these records unique so i'm going to rename this field as my unique web hook because it's unique for each record and coming in here i'm going to go ahead and start passing along this data right so the first thing i need to do after the webhook url is add a comma in my formula and then i'm going to put a question mark and i'll say i'll call it first name this time equals and then first name and here i need to be sure to include some quotations where i want to bring in text so really quickly everywhere that i want to have static text i'm using it inside of quotation marks and everywhere that i want to bring in a dynamic field i don't need those quotation marks and instead i reference a field there has to be commas that are separating these pieces as well so if i save right now what i'm going to get is a unique url that that is bringing in the first name with an equal sign and the first name that is unique to each person now i can continue to expand on this by bringing in the last name and the birth month as well so comma quotation last name equals quotation comma last name field comma quotation question mark birth month quotation comma and then we'll bring in the birth month so now we have a unique url for each person and it's taking their information that is unique to that record and it's going to pass it to zapier so let's close out the the webhook url where we were manually putting this data in and let's push one more piece of information into our our test so i'm going to click this web hook it opens up this url in another page that's fine i can close it out i'm going to go back into zapier now and i'm going to call this web or i'm going to check this webhook one more time and see if i can load that most recent uh data push and here i have this new request that it received three seconds ago if i look at this we see we have one long string so obviously i missed something in my syntax let's go back into that web hook and see what i goofed on question mark first name equals that looks right oh i missed my ampersand here i need to have that ampersand after the first parameter so the first parameter is always going to have the question mark and then everyone after that needs that ampersand so let's go ahead and save that try it one more time i'll try to pass a wider this time and let's go into zapier and call it one last time and see if we can get it to load appropriately all right we are now missing something here on the birth month so one more time back into our database let's make sure that we have the right equal sign here oh all right so as you can see definitely a little bit more advanced a little difficult to write these formulas sometimes especially doing it on the fly but i think we finally got it all set up let's try one last time with doc holliday pass that see if we can bring in doc holliday now and it should correctly parse out all that data let's take a look perfect all right so we received doc holliday and july as his information let's now build the next part of our automation we can use those three data pieces however we would like in our automation so for me i'm going to build a slack chat here and we are going to send a message to a specific channel in slack let's continue and dropping in here i'm just need to pick my my proper slack channel continue again and here's where i picked that channel so we've got a bunch of different channels here but i built one specifically for this webhook automation so flipping into my slack i just have a blank channel here where i'm going to be sending these messages so i want to bring in the text message here so i can say something like message alert and then i can say first name is and here's where i can start bringing in these parameters so i can bring in that first name that was found in the web hook and it will be different every time now last name is bring in holiday birth month is and we'll find that last piece of data here so from here i'm just going to go ahead and push this out into slack and run a test and review and flip over into slack and we see that we've got this uh this came in as follows so we can even come in here and re uh or dr drop right into our our automation and make changes if we need to now personally i don't like sending this url because i don't necessarily want everyone who receives this message to be able to go in and uh change that so i usually turn this off when i'm building these automations in order to do that we can go in and turn off this include a link to the zap so i'll say no here and auto expand links uh probably not relevant but i'll say no here as well and we should be good to go here so let's go ahead and turn this automation on and we are going to just give it a couple tests so inside of here as i mentioned the cool thing about webhooks is it's instantaneous so let's see if we pass this data on to our slack channel as quickly as i hope we do let's go ahead and push on johnny ringo here and flip into slack and see if we don't get a message pretty quickly all right so it took a little longer than i had hoped for looked like there was a bit of a stall in the automation but we still see that we're not getting that birth month pulled in correctly so one more edit let's jump back into the automation and see where things are going awry i'm going to go ahead and see if i can't load more data see if i can pull this in one more time so i do have that birth month getting passed so let's see why it's not getting distributed correctly in the slack channel coming on down here let's see if i can't just go back in and pull our options in one more time all right so before unfortunately i had accidentally named this query string birth month august and so i need to make sure that i'm accessing the right query string and so i need to make sure i'm just going for that query string birth month and so that is the problem there we were not passing query string august or birth month august we were passing birth month so now we should have that mapped appropriately let's go ahead and give that one more test and then we'll turn this automation on make sure that it comes in as we expect there's the birth month all right so now our web hook is working properly and to really kind of add some extra icing to the cake here you might instead of having this funky looking uh web hook this url just floating inside your database make this a little sexier by dressing it up in a button field so instead of using just the url field use a button field and the really great part about this is we can just use a url inside of here so really quickly i'm just going to put a placeholder here and i'm going to come inside of my formula that i've already built i'm going to copy it and i'll paste it into this button field and now just by pushing the button let's say we push it for myself again it will open up that url and in theory post that information inside of zapier so very cool instantaneous automation and to take this one step further you can also disable your button when certain conditions are not met now this of course requires a slightly more fancy formula but you can write some logic inside of your formula that says if conditions are not met be blank otherwise if they are met then and only then do i want to use or make this button viable so this is a great way that you can make sure that the button doesn't get pushed accidentally but it's only getting pushed when you actually want to initiate that automation as always i hope you found that to be very helpful if you did and you'd like to learn more swing on by our website and check out all the resources we've put together we have a free airtable crash course that will get you up to speed quickly and easily in air table and we also offer some paid services including hourly consultations with our experts we have some online group coaching programs and courses and for the very advanced needs we can build a bespoke project for you from scratch so swing on by and i look forward to connecting with you soon you

Channel: GAP Consulting

Views: 5,188

Keywords: airtable, gareth pronovost, airtable training, airtable consultant, airtable consulting, airtable demo, learn how to build automation, webhooks, what is a webhook, using webhooks with Airtable, airtable webhooks, airtable zapier automation, using a webhook with zapier, Zapier webhook trigger, Airtable Zapier tutorial, how to use Airtable and Zapier with webhooks, webhook, GAP Consulting

Id: xga2-H5OxOY

Length: 19min 36sec (1176 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 16 2020