I was working on a project this week that presented an problem with the way Airtable automations handle incoming webhooks.
The recent addition of the automation trigger “When webhook received” is really welcome, but its implementation needs some improvement, which will, no doubt, happen over time.
The scenario I had was this:
- When an invoice is finalised in Stripe, send the invoice data to Airtable
Stripe has a huge range of events that it can notify other systems about via webhooks, so I thought the set up of this should be straightforward. I had already planned to have my automation as:
- When webhook received, run script
Although you could use other automation actions such as “create record”, the Stripe payload structure is very nested and I knew Airtable automations don’t yet have an iterator component (like Zapier or Make), I knew from the start that a script would be required.
What I did not know is that Airtable doesn’t currently allow you to pick an arbitrary element of the nested payload to pass into your script. I wanted the main data object, but Airtable forced me to click through the nested structure to choose an end node/element. Not what I wanted.
I thought about using Make.com, which I knew would resolve the issue, but bringing another tool into the solution didn’t feel right.
The solution - One element I could easily get from the Stripe payoad was the Stripe invoice ID. So, my script action takes in this ID and then makes a call to the Stripe API to get that invoice in full.
When you think about it for more than 5 seconds, it feels like this is a crazy solution:
- get all of data sent to you via an incoming webhook
- get one element of that data
- make an API call to get all of the same data again
- do the thing that you original set out to do
And it is crazy. But I have kept the solution wholly in Airtable and there’s no performance issues (script timeouts for example).
