A patch is just a normal “update record” request, so you would just use Zapier’s “Update Record” action.

However, assuming that you haven’t already built a ton of zaps already, I would STRONGLY recommend against using Zapier.

Make is INFINITELY more powerful & customizable than Zapier, yet it is SIGNIFICANTLY CHEAPER than Zapier.

I wrote an entire post here comparing Make vs. Zapier.

If you’ve never used Make before, I’ve assembled a bunch of Make training resources in this thread. For example, here is one of the ways that you could instantly trigger a Make automation from Airtable. 

I also give live demonstrations of how to use Make in many of my Airtable podcast appearances. For example, in this video, I show how to work with Airtable arrays in Make.

Hope this helps! If you’d like to hire the best Airtable consultant to help you with anything Airtable-related, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consultant — ScottWorld

Thanks Scott, we are committed to using Zapier at this time.

I cannot use Zapier’s “Update Record” action for this due to the unconventional structure of what we are trying to accomplish.

We have one table (Table A) that has one record with multiple fields, and another table (Table that contains records for each field name in the other table. When a record is updated in Table B, we need to update the record in Table A but only update the field that matches the name of the record in Table B. I know this sounds crazy but we have a specific need to have our base structured this way. We cannot accomplish this with the standard Update Record action, but if we can get the PATCH to work, we can indicate which field to update using the triggering record.

Yes, you can do this with Zapier’s normal Airtable modules. You don’t need to write your own custom API calls for this. You would just need to perform a search for the record you’re looking for in the other table using Zapier’s “find record” function, and then you can update the record that it finds using the “update record” function. This is all natively built into Zapier.

- ScottWorld, Expert Airtable Consultant

I don’t think so… There are approx. 100 fields in Table A . Table B has 100 records named after the Table A fields. Table A only has one record, let’s call it “Inventory” (not a great label because we wouldn’t actually be doing this for an inventory base). 

When the “Value” field on the “Carrot” record in Table B is updated, we want to update the Carrot field on the Inventory record in Table A.

If the “Value’ field on the “Apple” record in Table B is updated, it should update the Apple field on the Inventory record in Table A.

There is only one “Value” field in Table B, and it needs to be distributed into 1 of 100 fields in one single record in Table A. 

If we used the update record function, we would be mapping the same Value field into all of the fields in Table A. So if Carrot gets updated, all fields on the Inventory record in Table A would be updated with that value, instead of only the Carrot field.

No, that’s not true. You get to choose the fields that you want to update. It doesn’t update the whole record, just the field that you specify.

I know I get to choose the fields to update, but I’d have to have 100 paths, one for each record that’s modified in Table B, so only the corresponding field in Table A is updated. (Ex. If Name = Carrot, run this path that only updates the Carrot field, another page If Name = Apple, run this path that only updates the Apple field, etc). I only want to update the field that shares a name with the triggering record.

Ah, I see. Yeah, this is one of the many advantages of Make. They allow you to do exactly what you’re talking about here by performing conditional logic WITHIN each field. I haven’t used Zapier in 5 years, so I don’t know if they’ve ever added this important feature or not.

Hopefully, someone else will be able to help you out with your custom API call. But I would also probably advise you to check how your database is setup. It sounds like you would be much better served if you optimized your database by using linked records instead of 100 different fields. It sounds like that would be the easier & more scalable long-term approach here.

- ScottWorld, Expert Airtable Consultant

Thanks, yes this is a very one-off use case where we cannot use linked records so we have to make do within this structure.

Ah, interesting. Hopefully someone can chime in to help you with this!

Found the answer, for anyone who finds this in the future - Zapier isn’t automatically passing over the Content-Type in the header so I had to add that manually: 

Content-Type: application/json