Combine external data source with existing table

[kungfulemmi]

Hello, 

I want to have a merged table consisting of entries I manually created plus entries with the same data structure that i fetch from an external data source via API.
The external source could be updated in the future and ideally I'd want the records in the table to update as well. Is that possible? Help is greatly appreciated 🙂

[TheTimeSavingCo]

Yeah it's probably doable!  Just roll your own updating / syncing workflow with an automation tool like Zapier, Make, IFTTT etc.  On the off chance your service isn't supported you'd need to write some code though

Any chance you can share what the external data source is?  Depending on the source there might be existing solutions you could just use off the shelf instead, like Data Fetcher for example

[ScottWorld]

@kungfulemmi 

Sure, that is super easy to do. There are 3 basic options for doing this:

1. Since you're tapping into an external API, you could use the datafetcher.com extension for this.

2. If you know Javascript, you could tap into the external API by writing your own custom Javascripts.

3. For a no-code/low-code way of doing this that doesn't require any knowledge of programming code at all, you can use Make's HTTP module to tap into the API, and then use the Airtable Upsert Record module to "upsert" your Airtable records — which means "merging" existing records and "adding" new records.

I demonstrate how to do this using a CSV file on this Airtable podcast episode, but you could easily do this with custom webhooks or any other sort of trigger that you want... so you wouldn't need to export your data as a CSV file.

And, if your API is natively supported by Make (here's their list of 1,700 apps that they support), it would be even easier to setup.

Alternatively, if you do want to export your data out of your other app as a CSV file, you can use Airtable's CSV Import extension to import & merge data.

p.s. If you have a budget for your project and you’d like to hire an expert Airtable consultant to help you with any of this, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consulting — ScottWorld

[ScottWorld]

I would not recommend using Zapier for this. Zapier is significantly less powerful & significantly more expensive than Make. I wrote an entire thread comparing Make vs. Zapier here.

[kungfulemmi]

Thank you both, I will try it with your solutions 🙂