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Pass data from trigger to action Zapier platform

  • 30 October 2020
  • 4 replies
  • 1159 views

Hi,

 

I’m trying to build an integration from a couple of days using Zapier platform and I’m facing an issue which seems to be quite the basics but can’t figure it out after reading the docs.

 

I’ve got my trigger working fine. I’m now creating the action.
My trigger is polling Spotify’s API for new tracks released on a certain page. So I retrieved track ids. And I just want to get these ids and use them in my action.

 

In this page from the docs https://platform.zapier.com/quickstart/build-action it’s said

Add the input fields from the Input Designer tab. Select Dynamic Fields that pull in data from triggers

It seems to be what I want, but in https://platform.zapier.com/docs/input-designer it says

Dynamic Fields make API calls to your app, then show the returned data in a dropdown menu so users can select the item needed, often used for folders, projects, assignees, and other data that would need to be chosen from your app

I don’t need to make API call as it’s my trigger doing that, and I don’t need dropdown. I just want the data to go straight to the action. From the console mode of Dynamic fields I don't understant how to do that.

 

Am I missing something?

 

Thanks !

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Best answer by Niels 7 November 2020, 12:48

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4 replies

Userlevel 7
Badge +14

Please provide screenshots of how your Zap steps are configured, thanks.

Thanks for your answer.

This is the trigger (there is no input):

 

Not totally sure if the output is correct…

 

And so for the action I don’t know how to retrieve these ids...

Userlevel 7
Badge +9

It doesn’t sound like you need a dropdown for this use case.  I think what you’re looking for is just a regular input field.  Allow the user to map something to the ID field, use the ID in your POST.  

Now, this is fine if you’re building something for yourself.  But if you were building this for others you’d have to consider how the action would be used in isolation (with a trigger from another app).  Where would a user get an ID from?  How do you ensure that the ID is actually valid? This is why we consider it a warning sign of bad integration design to have an ID field that’s not connected to a dropdown or a search.  Better design, I think, in this use case, might be to have a Search option as well where someone could, say, search a track by name and get an ID which could then be mapped into the action.  Either way you’d need to account for the case where the user maps in something that turns out not to be a real ID at Zap run time. 

You’d also want to return more useful data from that trigger, beyond the ID.  

Either way, it’d be a good next iterative/learning step to skip the dropdown, use a regular input field, get the bare bones action working, and then decide how to improve from there.  

Hi @Zane,

 

Thanks for your reply. Finally I got the answer I was looking for from Zapier support :

I used my app through a Zap. Zap’s trigger is my app’s trigger, and the action is either my app’s action or existing Spotify’s action which does what I want (the solution I chose). If you choose app’s action, you’d map map the fields returned by the Trigger to the Action step.

The data exchange between the trigger and the action is done kind of magically by the Zap :)