We’ve long been fans of Zapier and over recent years many customers have made lots of really useful integrations. The combination of agileBase and Zapier allows you to not only develop back office systems quickly but also link them into the wider ecosystem of cloud applications, all without writing a single line of code.
We’re now improving the Zapier integration to allow even more use cases using push.
The standard way to link Zapier to agileBase is to create a Zap based on a webhook poll. Every few minutes, Zapier will poll agileBase to see if there’s any data to send over. The most frequently this can be set to happen is once every 5 minutes.
This works well for cases where the action’s not particularly time sensitive, such as sending new email addresses to Mailchimp or invoices to Xero for example. However sometimes, you (or rather the user) want the action to take place immediately, on the press of a button.
agileBase has had the facility to push data to third party systems on demand for quite a while, but up until now these haven’t worked well with Zapier, rather requiring manual integration by a coder.
Now, some options have been added to the Push API settings to work with Zapier out of the box. Furthermore, these options will default to Zapier-compatible settings for new integrations.
In Zapier, set up a webhook integration and select ‘Catch Hook’ or ‘Catch Raw Hook’.
In agileBase, paste the URL Zapier provides into the Push URL field. For Push data format, select ‘JSON content body (Zapier compatible)’ and optionally tick ‘generate simple format JSON’.
A more detailed tutorial on how to use Zapier with agileBase will be coming soon, in the meantime, please get in touch if you have any questions when you try this out.
Thanks to our partner Little House Consultancy for suggesting this improvement and our customer Lewis Pies for being the first people to beta test and try it out in anger.
Other improvements
A couple of other platform improvements have made the cut for today’s release:
Floating help panels
A great suggestion from our next-door neighbours at the Bristol Bath Science Park, Willow DNA, who are expert e-learning consultants – thanks!
When you click a question mark icon on screen to show the relevant help for a field or block, the help popup can now be dragged around the screen. You can type and use the form on screen as normal while the help remains visible. That means you don’t have to look at the help, try to remember it then close it before acting on it.
Views with charts are shown
If a view has a one or more charts, a chart icon now appears next to the view name in the menu. Hovering over the icon shows the names of all the charts.
That saves the user having to know or guess which view contains the charts they want to look at.
Source: Agilebase