Add Action "Run an Automation" to Airtable Field Type "Button"

[hubkei]

What is the proposed idea/solution?

An extra Action for the Button Field inside a table (not in the interface), where we can select "Run an Automation"

How does is solve the user problems?

At the moment there is no direct way to run a simple automation from a button field. it only works on buttons in interfaces.

How was this validated?

The press of the button should also "pass" the record ID to the automation, so any automation ran can use the record ID to specifically work on a record.

Who is the target audience?

This is useful for everybody who wants to use the button field in day to day simple operations. 

[ScottWorld]

Yeah, it’s frustrating that this doesn’t exist in the product, especially since it exists at the interface level (although only with SOME of the interfaces — it is ALSO frustrating that it doesn’t exist with ALL of the interfaces).

There are only 2 workarounds to this issue, but neither one of them is as simple as a button simply running an Airtable automation:

1. Use a single-select field or a checkbox field to trigger an automation. A single-select field is best, because you can give the user status updates about their automation within the single-select field itself, such as “Automation Running” or “Error” or “Done”. I discuss this technique in this thread on automations: https://air.tableforums.com/t/what-are-the-pros-cons-to-using-a-checkbox-vs-yes-no-single-select-vs-...

2. Use an Airtable button field to trigger a Make automation instead of an Airtable automation. All you have to do is start your Make automation with a custom webhook, and then your button will activate that custom webhook. The downside to this approach is that it opens up a new browser tab when the automation starts running, but the very cool thing is that you can customize & design that new browser tab to say anything you want using custom webhook responses. I discuss this technique in this Airtable podcast episode: https://youtu.be/58urboTLZck?list=PLqssva4liHRwHhQIpTXekG8WObEoyC2F1

p.s. If your company has 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 consultant — ScottWorld