How do you overcome Airtables "When a record is created" trigger firing before inputting your data

Hey, so I heard that when manually entering data in Airtable, the trigger “Watch records” will likely fire before you’ve finished inputting your data.

I would like to know what workarounds anyone here has found for it

This is my automation

This will be scheduled so it won’t fire instantly anyways. That clock on the airtable tells you it’s not an instant trigger.

I see, 2 follow-up questions on this

  1. What if I am entering a data and mid-input the 15mins interval hit and MAKE extracts the incomplete data

  2. I am confused about this trigger filed in the screenshot below, could you explain to me a bit about it like what it is and how it works, I couldn’t find an article on it

You can use a filter on a route to evaluate whether you have a complete record and only then continue.

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This is an airtable feature. See the note below it? I think this is a date field that can be used for monitoring changes in your table.

Thanks for that tip…

If you have a Pro Airtable plan, you can also run a script in an Airtable automation. Then you can set whatever conditional Airtable trigger you want to send the record information to Make. Not my script. I just copied it from someone else. It works great for me because I mainly want an instant trigger, not a scheduled one.

e.g. this one is on Form submission. The form ensures that all the information is added for the Make scenario at one time.

Screen Shot 2022-10-05 at 10.54.27 AM

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Wow, that’s exactly what I was looking for, sadly the current plan doesn’t support that.

In case it did, I am wondering how can I write the script if I want to send 4-5 column data to make. I don’t have programming knowledge so curious to know how I can do it in the future

Yea, scripts in the automations is the only reason I upgraded from Plus to Pro.

In the original screenshot, I realized I blacked out an essential part of what you add to the end of a webhook to capture information, in this case the record ID. I just updated that, so take a look.

Since have to encode all the information into the URL, it would be easiest to do that in a formula field in Airtable and then pull it all in at the end of the webhook. Then replace the record ID input in the script with whatever field with the URL content is in Airtable.

The end of the webhook is something like /?fieldName=[url-encoded content]&fieldName2=[url-encoded content]. And you would have to update that webhook URL every time you adjust the fields you want to pull into Make.

I prefer to pull just the Record_ID from the webhook and use the “Get Record” action to pull the complete record information. It costs an operation, but I prefer the flexibility.

@alex.newpath seems real knowledge about this, so maybe he has a better suggestion.

Hey so I tried out this feature and although it works, what about the leads that don’t meet the filter?

Wouldnt they get lost in the system?

I added routers when the whole data didn’t exist and then delays in receiving the data, then I realized how stupid I was cause delays only delay the existing data and won’t wait to bring new data.

Another option is to add a sleep/delay module and then retrieve the record data again, which would then be updated. Not sure if there’s a simpler method.

Okay but the Airtable trigger I have is scheduled every 10mins, so if they pull in the data mid-input then adding the delay in Make won’t make a difference right cause only the existing data within that 10min mark is being delayed and it won’t wait for new data to come in.

or am I wrong here

The module steps would be:

  1. Trigger/Watch Records

  2. Sleep for 5 minutes (or your chosen time)

  3. Get Record from Airtable (use RecordID from the Trigger)

In subsequent steps, you would use the output from Step 3 because it would have all the record information available after that 5-minute delay.

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ohhhh genius, thanks for that input man.

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