One of the big limitations for Airtable users who are trying to use Zapier is that we only have 2 triggers: “New Record” and “New Record In View”.
The problem with “New Record in View” is that it will only trigger once for the entire lifetime of the record (in that view).
But I have discovered some pretty cool workarounds!
In regards to Zapier not being able to trigger multiple times for the same record, I have discovered 2 relatively acceptable workarounds to this issue. (Meaning that these workarounds are not really “full solutions”, but they should be acceptable for a wide variety of use cases.)
Both of these workarounds require a paid Zapier plan:
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As described in this Airtable blog entry, we can use Zapier’s Code by Zapier module as the trigger for any Airtable action (such as searching records to give us the records we’re looking for).
You don’t even need to know any JavaScript — you just set Zapier to run this simple JavaScript code that always returns “true”:
output = [{status: true}];
And that’s it! Based on which paid Zapier plan you’re on, this trigger will automatically trigger every 15 minutes, every 2 minutes, or every 1 minute.
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We can use the Schedule by Zapier module as our trigger for any Airtable action as well. Schedule by Zapier can only run a maximum of once every 60 minutes.
So both of these solutions are “workarounds” instead of “solutions”, because they are essentially scheduling your Airtable actions to happen on a regular interval.
Yes, it’s true that neither of these workarounds will immediately trigger an action when something in Airtable happens.
But they trigger frequently enough that these workarounds could potentially be used in a variety of different real-world scenarios.
For true instant automatic triggering, we can use:
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On2Air Actions with Zapier.
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Integromat — but note that Integromat has at least 2 important Airtable limitations that you need to be aware of, as I describe in this thread.
