Trigering a Script

[Julian_Kirkness]

I’ve been playing with the scripting block a little and it’s definitely a major step in the right direction - well done!

However, my first thought after running Hello World was how do I trigger a particular script from an event (say updating of a particular field in a table)? Also thinking about how to run scripts periodically - say a daily update or alert process?

Having said that I am of a mind to write a blog post about it - is that allowed on a beta feature?

[Bill_French]

Automation - replacing Zapier?

Ideally, script blocks will eventually work like Firebase cloud functions (Google), Lambda cloud functions (Amazon). They will be serverless micro-services that can be invoked externally. Once Airtable takes that step, the erosion of glue-factory integration dominance will commence.

This is precisely a key limitation of Script Blocks [today].

[Dru_Knox]

As Bill mentioned, we’re currently focused on making scripts useful in streamlining interactive workflows, but we’re interested in exploring more ways to trigger them in the future!

[Nicole_Lopez]

Triggering a script based on a table event, addition to a view, form submit action, etc was my primary use case for scripting. Totally makes sense that this isn’t in beta 1.0, but definitely looking forward to this functionality in later releases!

Until this exists, is there a way to trigger a script block programmatically? Say I have a Zapier event that will fire off on the trigger I want, could I make it call my script block?

[Bill_French]

Nicole_Lopez:

Say I have a Zapier event that will fire off on the trigger I want, could I make it call my script block?

Presently I don’t think that’s possible. Think of script blocks as little apps that have one interface - humans with a pointing device.

Ideally, script blocks will eventually support many pathways to trigger their operation:

• Called by formula
• As a formula (this is the idea that a script block IS is a custom formula)
• Called by another script block
• Called by a custom block
• HTTP POST (blocks should have callable addresses with parameters)
• Chron process
• Airtable events

[Allen_Hammock_h]

Hi @Dru_Knox this is probably the #1 feature of the scripting block that holds me back from using it extensively, which is to have scripts run in response to programmatic (non-interactive events). That said, I could probably code up a workaround in UIPath to cause programmatic events to fire up a browser and force UI events if I needed to. However, whether that scales probably depends on how often the programmatic triggers fire.

As your team is considering opening up certain kinds of programmatic events, are there ways to categorize events in such a way that some infrequent “batch” events might be allowed, for example an event that does the equivalent of a UI interaction as frequently as every hour of every day, different from the kinds of events that might overwhelm the backend (millions of programmatic calls)?

[Bill_French]

Allen_Hammock_hnm.cs:

I could probably code up a workaround in UIPath to cause programmatic events to fire up a browser and force UI events if I needed to.

Allen, perhaps a distraction to your quest for events, I’m curious about UIPath - is it able to interact with Airtable via a browser to effectuate a reliable process? (i.e., looking at a view and assessing if new records are present to base a trigger on)