Airtable

Airtable is a popular spreadsheet/database hybrid that makes it easy to build collaborative applications with little or no code. With a few simple steps, Automator automations can send data to Airtable spreadsheets and databases.

Create an Automation

To get started, make sure you have an Airtable account. It’s free to get started and the free account is sufficient to connect WordPress to Airtable.

There is unfortunately some complexity on the Airtable side to set it up to accept your data. Because of this, we recommend following this guidance provided by Airtable, as it will always have the most current instructions: https://support.airtable.com/hc/en-us/articles/1500003044161-Incoming-webhooks-trigger. At a high level, the following is required:

1. Create an “Automation” in Airtable. This will show a unique webhook URL that you will use in the next section to pass data from Uncanny Automator. The page looks like this, with the webhook URL visible in step 1 on the right:
   
2. Test the webhook. Use Automator to send a test to Airtable and confirm that it was successfully received.
3. Add an automation action. When data is received by Airtable, it needs to know what to do with it. By clicking Add action in the Run actions section, you can Create or Update a record.
4. Configure the Properties on the right side of the page so that the incoming webhook data is mapped to the correct Table and Fields in the Configuration section.

Create an Automator Recipe

Create your Automator recipe next:

1. Create your new Automator recipe and add Airtable as an action. Choose Send data to Airtable webhook.
2. Click the webhook box in the action to set the webhook parameters.
3. In the URL field, paste the URL you copied over from Airtable (from step 1 above). This goes in the top field in the screenshot below.
   
4. We recommend leaving the Request method, Data format and Headers as the defaults.
5. If you want to pass data from WordPress to Airtable, enter match Key and Value fields in the Body section. Think of a Key as a label for the value.
   1. Enter a text label in the Key field first.
   2. For Values, you will probably want to pass in dynamic data related to the user and WordPress environment. To choose variables, click the * symbol to the right of the value. You’ll see drop-down lists for common tokens as well as tokens related to the triggers in the recipe. An example of a common token is the user’s name, as it can be used in any recipe; a recipe token might be the name of a course associated with a course completion trigger. Choose a token to include by clicking it. You’ll see something like “{{user_firstname}}”. Make sure that you do not make any changes to the token format.
6. If you want to preview your outgoing data, click Check data format.
7. If you want to send a test webhook to Airtable, click Send test.
8. Save the action. Now switch the action from Draft to Live. Don’t forget to set your triggers and the recipe to live as well.

Take everything live

Once both the automation in Airtable and recipe in Automator are live, try triggering the recipe with a real example and confirm that the Airtable record is added or updated as expected.