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Hello everyone! I am trying to send data from a submitted form entry to a google sheet…. but I want to approve it before it gets sent. Neither of the methods I have thus far tried have worked… Would love any ideas!

 

I’ve tried:

  1. I created a hidden field called status, and set up a zap with a filtering action to only send new entries to the google sheet *if the status field has the word ‘approve’ in it*. It gets triggered when I modify the entry by typing approve in the status field, then duplicate it to create a ‘new entry’. No dice. I think duplicating an entry is not enough to trigger. It has to be a completely new entry…?
  2. I created a hidden field called status, with the word ‘undefined’ in it. Then I send all new form entries to a google sheet. I set a zap up to get triggered when I edit the status column in the google sheet, changing ‘undefined’ to ‘approve’. A cascade of other zaps are triggered when I do this (including sending to a new sheet containing only approved entries (my main goal), creating a WP user, creating a mailchimp user, etc). This seems to work fabulously most of the time, but sometimes it doesn’t. It seems to matter how much time passes between when the new entry gets sent to the first google sheet, and when I change the word ‘undefined’ to ‘approve’. Also, if I ‘approve’ entries too close together, one of them sometimes doesn’t work. 

Do you have any other suggestions/work arounds for my goal of getting only ‘approved’ data from Formidable into a google sheet (and then doing a few zaps along the way, like mailchimp, WP user, etc).

 

I’m willing to upgrade!

 

Thank you!!

Hi @Astro4Earth 

There are many workarounds to get this done, one I can think of now is to send yourself an SMS or Email with building a zapier webhook URL with URL parameter. If you want to approve you just have to click on the URL.

Thank you so much Rob! Unfortunately I’m not an expert and have never done a web hook before, so was hoping there would be a more built in way… sigh. 

 

Is there a way to hire a Zapier expert for a fee, just for an hour? 

Hi @Astro4Earth 

An alternative would be to use Airtable: https://zapier.com/apps/airtable/integrations

Airtable has Views.

Views have Filters.

Views can be used to trigger Zaps.

@Astro4Earth 

Just throwing this out there, but Zapier does have an approval step now.. Might be worth checking out to see if it could help you!
https://zapier.com/apps/approval/integrations 

Excellent, thank you so much folks, I will give all this a try!

Let us know how you make out here, @Astro4Earth! In the meantime, I am going to sum up the 3 recommended solutions for anyone following along:

  • Send yourself an SMS or Email with building a zapier webhook URL with URL parameter. To approve, click on the URL. If this is too technical, consider hiring a Zapier Expert to build this for you. 
  • Utilize Airtable’s “filtered views” feature. You can build a view to only show records that have the status “Approved”. You can select that view in your Zap to then trigger actions when a record is “Approved”. 
  • Explore “Approval by Zapier” to see if that supports your use case.

Hey all, so sorry for late reply. I explored Approval by Zapier but had some issues… it looks like it’s still in Beta and was acting a little inconsistent (though I am a beginner so it was probably me). So I went with the following, and it’s working great! It ended up being the best solution since I’m very much a web developer beginner. 

  • I created a hidden field  in my formidable form called status, with the word ‘undefined’ in it. Then I send all new form entries to a google sheet. I set a zap up to get triggered when I edit the status column in the google sheet, changing ‘undefined’ to ‘approve’. A cascade of other zaps are triggered when I do this (including sending to a new sheet containing only approved entries (my main goal), creating a WP user, creating a mailchimp user, etc). This seems to work fabulously most of the time, as long as I remember that each row can only get triggered once!

Hi @Astro4Earth!

I’m sorry that you couldn’t get Approval by Zapier working the way that you needed it to and thanks for sharing your workaround with us!

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