Google Agenda: updating an event always fail

Your screenshot doesn’t show the event ID you’re supplying. Are you sure that the event ID is entered correctly?

I think so. This is the top of the window.

It looks like you have placed the Airtable record ID in the Event ID field. I think you need to place the event ID from your google calendar. Since this automation is updating a single existing event in google calendar you need to tell the automation which event to update.

Not sure this is possible. These are the options I have when I want to edit the Event ID

When you create a Google Calendar Event in your first automation, you have to follow that step with an Update Record action step to insert the Event’s google event id of the event you just created into some field in Airtable. If you haven’t been storing this data in Airtable, Airtable will have no way to tell Google which event to update. Google doesn’t use Airtable record IDs to identify events.

Oh! Got it.
So I guess the key is to find a way to insert the right event id here (Google event id), otherwise you have to create a single automation for every single event, which is kind of useless. Am I missing something?

Yes, you are missing several things. Your screenshot is not correct. You don’t want to combine “create event” & “update event” in the same automation.

You already had an automation created for “create event”. In that automation, you would take Google’s Event ID and store it in Airtable.

Then, later on, in your 2nd automation for updating an event, you would use the Google Event ID that you’ve already stored in Airtable to update that event in Google.

OK, thanks for taking the time to look at my problem.
So I went back… added a “small text” field in my Table, called Google ID.
Then ran an automation in 2 parts:

• a new record in AirTable creating the event in Google Agenda;
• this new AirTable’s record being updated with the newly created Google ID in the Google ID field…

Test went well… I guess.

Then I went to create my 2nd automation: “when a record is updated”, using the Google ID field from my table to find the right event in Google Agenda… Again an error, this time: **Received invalid inputs.

Maybe the Google ID field should not be a “small text field”? Any idea?

1. Your 2nd and 3rd screenshots don’t show if you’re sending the right Event ID to Google.

2. You will need to change your trigger to something like a checkbox field (or a single-select field) that you select after you have filled out all the appropriate information for the event. You can’t just monitor those fields or else you will be sending incomplete information to Google.

3. You will need to re-test your trigger up above in order to be able to re-test your action down below.

Hi. Having a bit of time to test this again.
I thought I was getting somewhere when I got many tests going well.
Then, in real life…
Weirdly, when I create a record, I get this message: “Unable to parse datetime”
Then I take the exact same record in AirTable, just duplicate it… and it works.
There must be a simple explanation.

You are using the “when record is created” trigger. Unless you’re submitting records via a form, the API/scripting, inside a grouped view, or duplicating records, all non-calculated fields come in blank.

Your first screenshot plainly shows that no start or end time was passed because those fields were blank. You need to select a different trigger that suits your needs. Either use a more definite trigger (e.g. “when Checkbox is checked”) or use a formula field to compare the Last Modified time of your relevant fields to NOW() to trigger the automation (e.g. if difference between Last Modified and Now > 10 min, display “ready”, else display “not ready”)

Very good advice. I created a checkmark field and a text field to store the Google Event ID. When the checkmark is used, a Google event is created, and the text field is almost immediately updated. It works perfectly.
But for the modified records, I am struggling a bit. There must be a simple way to use the last modified time but I can’t seem to find it. I do not like the idea of using some checkmark field each and every time i modify a record (which I have to do quite often).

You can have the “modify google calendar event” automation on every update if you’d like, you need the checkbox for the “create google calendar event” since you need to what until some date is there in Airtable to pass off to google.

Unless you’re constantly deleting the dates and adding them back.