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Question

How do I send information back to an Interface?

  • 10 May 2023
  • 5 replies
  • 292 views
Jason Steele

This post was split from:

 

 

I don’t see any other training guides for Zapier Interfaces, except this tread, so if I am missing something, I apologise.

I just started playing with Interfaces today and I am lost (I could build what I am thinking about in CF or ASP etc in about an hours of hand coding, but this way of building things seems lacking - we’re only allowed to use Zap or FS however, so I don’t have a choice).

Granted, the Interfaces server has been throwing 500/504 errors all day, so I haven’t been able to do a lot of experimentation, but one thing that stands out is that I don’t seem to be able to generate a read-only field?

I need to be able to ask for their ID, have the form query HubSpot with their ID and pull certain pieces of data back from HS to the interface form and present it to them for review/validation w/o reloading the Interfaces page. I want the field to be visible, but not editable. So far, all I seem to be able to do is specify if the field is hidden or required?
 
I’m also not sure how we only show the next Interfaces “form” after the data has been successfully pulled back from HS, but I will play with that more once I can play more with a stable Interfaces server.

This post has been closed for comments. Please create a new post if you need help or have a question about this topic.

5 replies

SamB
Rank
Userlevel 7
Badge +11

Welcome @Jason Steele, thanks for joining the Community! 🙂 

Interfaces is still in beta at the minute so I’d expect that it may not have all the kinks worked out yet, but there’s a more official help guide for it here: Create interactive pages and apps with Zapier Interfaces (Beta) 

That said, is the information that’s pulled from HubSpot stored in a Zapier Table that’s connected to the form? If so, you could add a page that has the Table component. Then you could set the form’s actions to navigate to the page that contains the Table. And on the table disable the Edit permissions for the Table component:
5b8e2a77cde010f220fe5fdafe64c532.png
That way when the user is presented with a the page that has the table displayed they’ll just be able to see the fields but won’t be able to edit them.

Does that sound like they could work here? Or are you looking to limit the table view to only the record that they’ve just added? 

Jason Steele

I am using Tables to record data and the process flow, and I have multiple “pages” setup in my Interfaces project. With the help of the Interfaces team, I have made a lot of headway and have mapped out how this project can flow and work, but I am in a new situation (although still related).

I mentioned elsewhere that I needed to be able to send back a message to the end-user about the progress of the current task (ie did it succeed?, did it fail?, why did it fail?, next steps?).

Example, if the attached ZAP comes across an error due to something like it not finding the user in Hubspot, then I need to send a message back to the user (who is still staring at their screen at this point, waiting for some indication that they are done or not) that their account was not found and to start again.

It was suggested that this could be done by having the ZAP redirect to a new page in the project that would display the error message. HOWEVER, there does not seem to be an action in the “Interfaces by Zapier” app that I can apply in the ZAP to show the new page? We need to show different pages with certain pieces of information through this project, so not only do we need to redirect the user to the new page in the Interfaces project, but we need certain pieces of data we collect along the ZAP path to be included when loading that new page.

I am not having any luck figuring this part out, and it seems to be the last piece in the puzzle I have in creating this initial project ... a project, I might add, that is both an experiment to determine if Interfaces is worth using in our arsenal, and also an important project for our thousands of users.

I have an email in to the Interfaces Team as well about this, but if anyone else has an idea on how to do this, then it would be appreciated. It seems like many simple things, that we take for granted when we used to hand-code apps, are missing from the no-code environment(s)

SamB
Rank
Userlevel 7
Badge +11

Thanks for following up here @Jason Steele! 

Hmm, I’m not seeing any action that would allow you to send this information back to the page or create a new one either. I couldn’t see an existing feature request for the ability to create new interface pages or flag up Zap errors directly within the interface itself. I can definitely see this being useful to others as well so I’d recommend also reaching out to our Support team to get a feature request added for this.

In the meantime, I wonder, could you use an Update Record (Tables by Zapier) action to add the error information into a column that logs whether it ran successfully or errored? Thinking that would potentially allow the user to see if it was successful or had errored. Then if they make some subsequent changes and it works a Zap could update that same “Success/Error” column accordingly. I know it’s not an ideal solution but do you think that could work in the meantime?

Jason Steele

Thanks for the idea. That may help in certain situations, but there will be others that still require redirection. It seems odd that they included linear redirection for the form itself, but didn’t think that the ZAPs would potentially also need something similar.

The only drawback to the idea you suggested, is that since they also don’t have a way to make fields in the form Read-Only, the user can alter that field information, which updates the Table real-time. If we use a watcher-style ZAP to continue, it may end up reading incorrect information if they change it. 

I thought I had a possible interim solution when I saw the “Code by Zapier” that could run JS - figured I could just use an HREF command to do the redirection, but the JS seems very limited and does not have that function in the library. So, no glory there either.

I have sent in a couple of emails with the team and Joshua offered to chat with me about use cases at one point, but I haven’t seen responses to those emails yet. So, we will see.

I have a list a mile long that could/should be submitted as Feature Requests, but I consider the lack of them more bugs than Feature Requests, because these very basic functions should have already been included already. They are the cornerstones of building high functioning, rock-solid apps in the first place.

I will submit my list, but hopefully the team gets back to me on my other questions soon - I am falling way behind on this project.

Thanks for listening and a possible idea to get this to a possible fundamental state at least. 

Danvers
Userlevel 7
Badge +12

Hi @Jason Steele 

Thanks for sharing your thoughts with us. Interfaces is very much still in Beta, and the product team is actively working on updating and adding to it. I know that they will be really interested to hear your suggestions!

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