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Jun 21, 2019 02:44 PM
Airtable Now Supports Webhooks!
This has been an open item in the Airtable support community for a few years, see “Webhooks for Records” and here, & here, and we are excited to offer a free solution to the community.
Here is the high level solution:
Based on the transitive property (A=B and B=C, then A=C), Airtable supports Slack Notifications, and Slack supports webhooks, so Airtable supports webhooks! You just have to know how to set it up correctly.
With a simple integration via Pipedream into Slack, all Airtable users can now get near real time notifications of all updated fields and values in Airtable.
This is a game changer for anyone building automations based on Airtable because you don’t have to poll the Airtable API (which is what Zapier or Integromat do). Specifically, the benefits of webhooks (vs. all other existing solutions) are:
Once this is setup correctly, you can use this webhook functionality in a wide variety of ways.
You can create a webhook to go anywhere (including sending it to your own infrastructure or some third party like Zapier / Integromat), you can trigger automations in other Saas applications (such as sending an email via Sendgrid, or adding data to Salesforce) or you can send the data to a data warehouse (S3, Snowflake, etc)
Here is a full post on Medium with how to get Airtable webhooks working - Airtable Now Supports Webhooks!
If you have any questions, fire away!
Jun 21, 2019 03:13 PM
I think thats a bit disingenuous to claim that. Airtable does not support webhooks. You’ve created a workaround to the lack of webhooks, which is cool. But Airtable does not support webhooks (of course, I wish they did!) I don’t think you should be making that claim.
just my 2c.
Jun 21, 2019 03:17 PM
Thanks for your comment. Here are my thoughts:
A. The power of this workaround is that you can receive a webhook with all the data that an Airtable webhook would provide.
B. I think the clarification is quite clear – “Based on the transitive property (A=B and B=C, then A=C), Airtable supports Slack Notifications, and Slack supports webhooks, so Airtable supports webhooks! You just have to know how to set it up correctly.”
Given how many Airtable solutions you have built and how active you are in the community, it would be great if you could try out the solution and give specific feedback on how we can improve it.
Our goal is to get as close as possible to Airtable fully supporting webhooks for all customers, for free.
Jun 24, 2019 11:34 PM
Does this somehow allow you to capture the deletion of a record in airtable?
TIA.
Jun 25, 2019 09:58 AM
Based on our testing it appears that Airtable does not inform Slack when records were deleted. So, this remains a limitation it appears.
Jun 25, 2019 10:00 AM
thanks for confirming. It’s one of a few “limitations” that stops us underpinning more solutions using Airtable.
thanks
Jan 15, 2020 05:24 AM
This is a neat workaround, but very limited.
Jan 22, 2020 10:48 AM
Thanks for sharing more about your workaround @Tod_Sacerdoti!
For anyone reading, I want to point out that this is a third-party solution not created by Airtable. To prevent confusion, I’m going to close this topic from further replies.