Incoming webhooks for automations ✨

[Jason]

On top of other releases this week, we have another exciting new feature - incoming webhooks for automations!

With the new incoming webhook trigger you can connect Airtable with many of the tools and products that you and your team use (whether a third-party service or an internal tool).

Normally, you’d have to write custom code and spin up your own infrastructure in order to handle webhooks, but now, whenever an event fires in another product, you can tap into the full power of Airtable Automations to handle it accordingly.

How it works

The incoming webhook trigger will create a unique URL that you can use to trigger an Airtable automation. You can use this URL with another service’s webhook configuration UI, or use it directly from your own custom code (e.g. from an internal tool). When Airtable receives a request at this URL, we’ll then trigger the automation that you configured (just like our other triggers).

This enables you to integrate with services that Airtable doesn’t currently support, or to programmatically trigger automations, preventing you from having to write custom code or manage your own infrastructure.

You can learn more about using the incoming webhook trigger in our Support Center.

View support article →

[Beagle_Dev]

I’m with Andrew – getting the entire payload body will enable us to process it with a script.

This would be a relatively small fix with a big impact.

[Jason]

Hi everyone, I wanted to share that we now support application/x-www-form-urlencoded payloads.

[Eugene_Kim]

Hi @Jason , are there plans for record webhooks that are separate from automations? That I’m limited by the automations quota is a big limiting factor

[kuovonne]

@Jason Any chance of incoming webhooks supporting GETwith url parameters?

[Jason]

kuovonne:

Any chance of incoming webhooks supporting GET with url parameters?

I’ll check with our team and let you know!

[Jason]

@kuovonne It’s not something we have planned currently, but we are gathering feedback for the future if/when we build that out. If you have any unique context or applications for this to share I’m happy to pass it along to our developers :thumbs_up:

[Karl_L]

The support article leaves a lot to be desired. It explains how to test a webhook, but not how to actually apply it in an Airtable context.

Can I, for example, trigger an automation when a colleague clicks a URL in an email (with prefilled parameters)?

[Justin_Barrett]

Karl_L:

Can I, for example, trigger an automation when a colleague clicks a URL in an email (with prefilled parameters)?

Webhooks must be called via a script where you can control the request type. Unfortunately a plain URL won’t work because the webhook call must be a POST request. URLs that pass data in the URL itself are sent via a GET request. A quick test to confirm this theory returned a 404 error.

[Bill_French]

Justin_Barrett:

Unfortunately a plain URL won’t work because the webhook call must be a POST request.

The workaround - it should be pretty straightforward to create a proxy service that converts the GET into a POST. If asked I would build this in AutoCode or maybe Nginx.

[Brian_Gumm1]

Seconding adding the ability to select a section of, or the entire JSON payload, to an input variable that a subsequent script action can process.

For my use case, there’s no way to anticipate exactly what a certain section of the payload will contain, so I can’t pull out individual fields & their values. I’ll need to be able to traverse the payload and figure out what I’m working with.