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Does anyone have experience publishing to social media platforms using a delay timer?

I keep running into issues with Airtable urls expiring, but when I use the ingested image “file” field, it also fails.

Thanks in advance and any assistance or advice is greatly appreciated.

 

Hi @ChooseReach 

Airtable updated their file URLs system few months ago where the links will expire after a short period of time. They have a solution here: https://support.airtable.com/docs/airtable-attachment-url-behavior#recommended-practices

Ah, this makes sense now. The information on that page is very useful for my situation. 

Since I’m having trouble using the zapier/airtable “file” field, my workaround will probably be to host the files on my CDN and reference it in a url field in airtable instead. 
 

Thank you!

Hi @ChooseReach,

I’m glad to hear that robschmidt was able to point you to the right direction!

If you have any other questions, please don’t hesitate to ask in the Community. We’re always happy to help! 😊

Hi @ken.a , thanks for chiming in here. I setup the airtable zap to use the file field and get this error:

 

  • While requesting "dev_file" from Airtable (2.3.2) we ran into an error: You passed {raw: true} in request() - the response.content property is not available! Try response.body.pipe() for streaming, response.buffer() for a buffer, or response.text() for str

 

 

Anyone ever have any luck using the airtable attachment file field in combination with the delay function?

Hi @ChooseReach,

I did some research, and it looks like this is happening because file links from Airtable started expiring after "a couple hours." This change took effect on the 8th of November 2022, and you can read more about it here:

https://support.airtable.com/docs/airtable-attachment-url-behavior

This means that, because there's a Delay that can be longer than 2 hours, that file is no longer available when we try to send it to the action of the Zap

The trick here would be to use a Google Drive (or other file storage step) before the Delay to upload that file. You can then use the output of this new step to retrieve the file, since it will last longer than the 2 hours that Airtable provides currently.

Here's a step-by-step guide on how you can modify your Zap:

  1. In the Zap that triggers when a new record is added to Airtable, add a new action step after the trigger.
  2. Select Google Drive (or another file storage service) as the app for this action.
  3. Choose "Upload File" as the action event.
  4. Connect and set up your Google Drive account.
  5. In the "File" field, use the file data coming from the Airtable trigger.
  6. Continue setting up the rest of the action as necessary and then finish by clicking "Continue".
  7. Now, instead of using the temporary Airtable URL in following steps, use the URL of the file on Google Drive. This URL will not expire after 2 hours.

Hopefully, this helps! 😊

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