How to instantly trigger Airtable workflows in make.com using webhooks

If you want to run a make.com workflow that triggers when something happens in Airtable, you typically have to wait for 5 - 15 minutes depending on how you set your schedule - unless you use a webhook fired from inside Airtable Automations.

Airtable

make.com

October 15, 2022

Airtable triggers only work on a schedule in make.com

If you run a workflow in make.com that is triggered by Airtable, we run into the inconvenient issue of running a workflow on a scheduled interval.

Let's say for example you get a client to update an Airtable record that then has to immediately update a Webflow item, we face the challenge that we have to wait for our set interval to trigger the workflow.

Logic suggest that in a worst case scenario, we could just set our interval to 1 minute. The issue is that every minute make will make an API call to Airtable and that API call counts towards your usage.

How to trigger Airtable workflows instantly

The ideal scenario would be to run our Airtable workflows the second a certain condition is met in our base. For example, when a record moves into view, a new record is created or a record matches a particular condition, we want to immediately trigger our workflow in make.com. Unfortunately that is currently not possible in make.com.

There is however an awesome workaround using webhooks.

How to use webhooks to trigger make.com workflows

The answer is webhooks - if you don't know what Webhooks are, they are custom triggers that you can connect to whatever app event you want. This is particular handy in our use case because we want to trigger our workflow whenever something happens in Airtable.

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There are two steps involved with getting this setup. Firstly, we need to set up a script in Airtable automations that fires the webhook and then we need to configure our make.com workflow as above to fire whenever we trigger our webhook via Airtable automations.

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Step 1: Trigger the event using Airtable Automations & fire webhook

In Airtable Automations start off by defining the event you want to use to trigger the workflow. In my case, I choose when a record matches condition. As soon as you have defined your trigger, you want to add a scripting module that will allow us to fire the webhook in make.com.

I have left the code I used down below, so feel free to copy and paste it into your workflow.

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One important thing to add in your script is an input variable for the Airtable record id. We will later use this Airtable ID to retrieve the record in Airtable.

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Step 2: Receive webhook data in make.com

Create a new scenario and add a custom webhook as your trigger. You will be have to add a new one, so click the add button and give your webhook a recognizable name. Once you have saved and added your webhook you will get a webhook URL that you can simply copy and paste that url into "webhook" variable in your Airtable script.

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Step 3: Test the script in Airtable Automations and make.com

As soon as you have added your webhook to your script, you can click on the test button and see if it works.

Now, if everything was setup correctly you will firstly see that you received a 200 status response in the console on the right side. This tells us that we successfully triggered the webhook URL specified in our script.

If everything worked correctly in make.com, we should now also see that we received information in the form of a record ID. This information is passed through via the URL parameters that we define in our script. The Airtable ID is all we need to now retrieve all the information of our record in the final step.

Simply, add a "Get a record" in Airtable step by mapping the Airtable ID we passed through via the webhook, and that will allow you to instantly retrieve your record. From here, you can really add whatever module you want.

Summary

If you want to instantly run your Airtable workflow (rather than wait for your interval), fire a webhook in make.com via Airtable automations.

Use the code

let record = input.config();

let webhook = '';

let urlParams = record.airtableID;

let call = await fetch (`${webhook}?recordID=${urlParams}`);

console.log (call);

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