How to Use Webhooks with Airtable

In many cases, automation is fairly straightforward to build. Simply connect your software, choose your trigger and actions from a list, and away you go! However, sometimes the specific thing you're trying to automate doesn't already have a trigger established. There are an unlimited number of possibilities here, but let's use the example of pushing a button in Airtable. At present, there isn't a trigger that you can map to an automation that says "when button is pushed in Airtable, set this automation in motion." But that doesn't mean that you can't make your own... this is where webhooks come into play!

There are two main types of webhooks, but in this example we are working with a "Catch" hook - this hook fires instantaneously and it's easy to set up, so I use it exclusively. The webhook address is provided for us (in this case, from Zapier), but we need to pass additional data as well. For this, we write a CONCATENATE formula to add extra data to the end of our hook - this data is then passed to our automation software and can be used in future steps of the automation.

In this example, I create a simple button that passes three datapoints and posts a message in Slack. It's very simple, but the points are the same... data can be passed from your custom webhook trigger and filled into any automation you can conceive of!