Help designing a process - action to call external API

[solar_dude]

Hey all!
Hope you're having a wonderful holiday season so far.

There's this part of the process where I could use guidance from somebody a little bit more experienced!

A user puts required information to a view. After that information is put in, an external API needs to be called (a webhook is acceptable). Ideally, I would want this to be a clickable action, however it doesn't seem like there's a way for the action to be bound to an automation which calls an API.

Does anybody know of a workaround which would allow an in-app action to invoke an external API?

All the best,

solar_dude

[Suvrutt_Gurjar · Accepted solution]

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@solar_dude wrote:

After that information is put in, an external API needs to be called (a webhook is acceptable).

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Based on the understanding of your requirement, you could try the option mentioned in the article below under the section "Send an email from an Action button" . Of course instead of sending email, you could invoke the data change bot that then invokes the API. This option is to manually invoke the API as required by you

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@solar_dude wrote:

. Ideally, I would want this to be a clickable action,

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Alternatively if the user puts some information in a form view, you could have the API bot as a data change bot on form save.  This will not be a user clickable event but a form save event to invoke the bot. So it will invoke on a form save.

[solar_dude]

Oh gotcha, so listen for updates and create an automation off of data change that way. It's a workaround but looks like it should work! Thanks man!

I was expecting it might be possible to call an automation directly from an action, but it doesn't look like this is possible.

[Suvrutt_Gurjar]

Yes,  you are correct. The automation bots are either data change bots ( which means data in a record needs to change in some way ) or scheduled bots that run at a predetermined time frequency.