My scenario watches Airtable for the submission of a form response using the Make “Watch Responses” module.
But I don’t like that user experience at all. The user sees a screen saying they are being redirected in 5 seconds to a long, ugly link. I need to keep the user on the “Thank you for submitting the form!” screen.
I prefer to use the built-in Make module to watch for Airtable form responses over a watch records module. I’m writing the scenario for completely non-technical people to maintain, so an instant trigger acting on just one record is far superior than converting to a “Watch Records” module firing on a schedule and processing multiple records.
How can I do the instant trigger while still maintaining Airtable’s thank you screen?
Unless I am misunderstanding here, this sounds more like Airtable behavior that isn’t related to Make.
If the user sees the “Thank you for submitting the form!” but are then being redirected to another page, there might be an Airtable Form setting that is causing that, such as “Redirect to URL after the form is submitted”.
Airtable’s options are mutually exclusive, sadly. Either you display a thank you screen or you redirect to the webhook. There doesn’t seem to be a way to do both.
My apologies, I didn’t realize Airtable worked like that.
I don’t have their Pro plan, so I can’t test redirecting to a URL upon form submission.
One of the reasons I primarily use SmartSuite instead.
Anyway, I don’t have a 100% grasp on your workflow, but here’s what I think you might be able to do… it will involve two scenarios.
Set up the Airtable form to redirect to a URL upon form submission, that URL will be the Webhook trigger that starts the first scenario. #1: Webhook Trigger → Webhook response → Make Run a Scenario (run scenario #2) #2: Airtable Watch Responses or Watch Records → the remainder of your original scenario.
Scenario #1 would get triggered by the Airtable form submission by using redirect to URL to call the webhook.
Webhook Response would respond immediately with either some HTML (your own Thank You message/page - ask ChatGPT to whip up some HTML for you for this one) or redirect the user to another page of your choice. This way you do see the redirect message but hopefully not for long.
Make Run a Scenario would run scenario #2 which would basically be your original scenario.
If you want to stick with one scenario:
Webhook Trigger (be sure to include the record ID) → Webhook response → Airtable Get a Record → The remainder of your original scenario
This way the user still gets a pretty thank you screen and your scenario gets to run instantly.
Either way, the only thing I am not sure of is whether Airtable will receive and correctly handle a Webhook response.
So, Airtable is quite tricky with webhooks, it accept them, but not really optimised to send them.
What you can build to have you fluid user experience, and run optimisation it to trigger your scenario with a mailhook
On Make to initialise your mailhook and get the email
On Airtable, in the Automation part, you create an automation that will be triggered when a new form is submitted and sen an email with the Record_ID within the message.
On Make, you receive the mailhook with the record_id, and just have to add a “get a record” on airtable step to recall all the data
The Airtable Automation should like something like that :
To trigger a Make automation off the submission of an Airtable form, I tried the Airtable Watch Responses module. This works by generating a webhook, which is then configured into the form in Airtable. When the user submits a form, the form redirects to the webhook URL, causing the unwanted redirect screen. I believe it would work the same way if I instead used the Make generic webhook module because the webhook would have to be in the Airtable form. There is no way to suppress this when using an Airtable form according to people in the Airtable community. We would have to use a third party form solution.
It would work the same way, but adding the Webhook response (add it immediately rather than at the end of the scenario) should allow you to either forward the person that filled the form to another page or generate HTML on the fly that can be presented (sort of mimicking the Thank You page.) It depends on how Airtable handles it. I tried testing myself, but even on the Pro trial it won’t let me enable redirect to a URL when form is submitted.
That’s a creative workaround, @Amandine! I’m going to keep it in mind for the future. It isn’t suitable for my use case, however. I’m building something to be maintained by completely non-technical people, so I want it to reside solely within Make or as an Airtable automation.
I’d say @Amandine’s solution is the best for this situation.
It satisfies your original ask of an instant trigger when the form is submitted, and leaving the user on Airtable’s Thank You message.
It’s common in SmartSuite too for capturing specific changes to records without wasting Ops in Make listening for every single change.
I’ve got my Airtable Pro up and running and was finally able to test this out, specifically how Airtable forms handles Make’s Webhook responses.
It does work as I had hoped in that you can:
Submit the form
Redirect to the webhook URL
Unfortunately, here, they would still see the 5-second redirect message.
Serve the user with a Thank You page OR forward them to another URL (both worked)
Continue the remainder of the Scenario
On the plus side, you would have much more control over what they see after the redirect.
Something that might be helpful is a review of what they entered, with a chance to update it should they identify a mistake.
You can even put special code, if you wanted, to close the tab/window after submitting the form. You submit the form, see the redirect screen, then the tab/window closes.
Hi Jean,
maybe I misunderstand, but I think you can just:
add an automation that triggers when a record is created.
Next use the “Run script” module.
Define which values to use in the script (I often only send the record id and do a lookup of all neeed data in the make scenario).
Create the make scenario that listens to a webhook.
In the airtable automations “Run script” module call the webhook with the fetch function.
Something like this
let inputConfig = input.config();
console.log(`The value of record_id is ${inputConfig.record_id}`);
let response = await fetch(`https://webhook.site/1dea3bf2-c9ba-4358-90c3-a6ccdfa3570c?record_id=${inputConfig.record_id}`);
// console.log(await response.json());
You can also update a hidden required field when submitting the form and trigger the automation when this is set.
I have many automations like this and it works pretty reliable.
With the utmost optimism, I tried your proposed solution, but it did not work for me. Same result as other automation solutions triggered by new record creation and using script to attempt to open a webhook.
That is, after Airtable’s web page submission notification ‘Thank you for submitting the form!’, the script executes and throws the error “TypeError: Response status was 302 ‘Found’ but redirect mode was set to ‘error’.”
It seems that Airtable is preventing redirection once the Airtable web form has been submitted, unless the ‘Redirect to URL after the form is submitted’ option for the form is set, resulting in the annoying 5 seconds of painful waiting and potentially disastrous ‘Back’ and ‘Continue’ options.
Oh well, back to the drawing board.
So grateful for people like you, Ingo. At least you give us something to try.
