Get external data via an Airtable formula?

[Michel_Billiau]

Hi,
I’m new to Airtable programming, so I apologize if this is obvious for the most of you…
Is it possible to directly retrieve external data from another website (through their API) ?
I’m working on a personal movie db, and it would be nice, that if I give in a column the unique IMDB id, it will get me the IMDB rating automatically in another column ?
If not possible via Formula, how should I proceed ?
Thx for any helpfull reply

[Nicho_Worth]

Where is the link to the step-by-step video?

[Phong_Nguyen]

Worked well with you solution. Thank you.

Im using OMDB based on your instruction to grab a lot of metadata from IMDB id (for ex: rating from tt3896198)

Another guide is grabbing image attachment instead of URL can be found here by user SDOK_Blog

New Data Type: Image URL Product Suggestions

HI everyone. I was searching for a solution to Upload files through URL, and I found for myself an automation software called Integromat. It’s like Zapier, but as for me much flexible and easier to use. Also there is no limitation for steps, just for operations/month (in the free version). I created a little video of how to use it. Hope this will be helpful. Video - https://youtu.be/ucoXsRejUT0

[Wayne_Simpson]

@W_Vann_Hall - thanks for this, I managed to create a flow whereby I complete a task (in this case a movie) on Todoist and the flow populates Airtable with the movie details and my comments on it and in one click, the Airtable creates a nice page with everything on it! Great!

I do have one issue however, and that is I have to change the title on Todist to just the movie name, as opposed to a link for it to work. What I’d like to do is get Integromat to pull out the title from some code. So for example, the code is: The Courier, I just want to extract “The Courier”, I can not for the life of me figure it out! Can anyone provide any advice?

[Beau_Boeye]

This has been a great thread thus far. I followed the steps above to get something similar going for a volunteer-operated theatre’s website.

You can alter the Zapier zap slightly by creating a button within Airtable to trigger the zap. This worked much better for my situation.

Here’s a script tutorial you can follow to add to your scripting app within your base: airtable-send-data-to-webhook.js · GitHub

Change your trigger within Zapier to catch a webhook. Paste your Zapier webhook into your script and follow the rest of the instructions both above regarding OMDB, and the script instructions I posted above.

[Andy_Cloke]

Awesome guide!

Another way to easily import external data into Airtable is the free Data Fetcher extension. It’s got dozens of Airtable integrations you can use to import data without code.

You can also use custom requests to connect to any REST API.