How I Zap Form Fields to Airtable Without Messy Paths

Hey guys, this is Isaac from sapaholic.com and opstra.co, where we've helped over 50 clients automate their processes and workflows using Zapier. So in this video, I wanna share how you can go about transferring data from a form submission to a database, like something like a spreadsheet or Airtable, when in the form there's a lot of optional fields that might end up creating empty records or empty rows in your database, which is something you don't want. Now, if you've ever used Zapier in the past, you know that it's a very if-then-this-then-if-this-then-that sort of environment. So I'm gonna— I wanna walk you through how I thought about creating this particular Zap in the first place and how I ended up doing it. And why the way I thought about it initially was gonna be a pain in the butt, and it was gonna be a nightmare to manage, and why the ultimate— the way I discovered how to do it ultimately was superior. Now, the context of this conversation. This is a daycare company, a daycare center that wants to digitize their application form. The challenge is that their application form can be for up to 3 children, 3 children, and up to 5 adults. So every application needs the information of X number of children and X number of adults. However, it's up to 3 and up to 5, but there's a lot of possibilities there because it's only one children required, and 3 contacts required. In other words, we need to make sure that we are able to create only the number of records in the children's table, which I'm gonna share in a second, and the number of records in the adult or the contact table that people actually put in the application field. Um, it's gonna make a little bit more sense in a second after I show you your table, but I want to walk you through how I initially thought about creating this. Okay, so, uh, for a variety of reasons, it made sense to create the adults first. Uh, for context, there's an adult spreadsheet or table, and there's a children's spreadsheet or table. So the way I initially thought about it, uh, was simply to trigger the form submission. That would be my first step in the process. And from there, I was going to do the following. I was going to create the main contact, which is, again, if you remember, required. So this is not— this was not going to be a problem because this contact is always there. So that wasn't going to be an issue. The issue comes when I get to contact number 4. Give me a second. So let's repeat this process again for contact number 2. Create contact number 2. Let's just call it record. And then we were going to create, create contact number 3. record. Okay? Now here's where the problem comes in, because technically from here we could create a contact number 4. But my initial thought was, well, only if there is data available in the form. So the way I thought about this initially was like, okay, if there's a 4th record, right, we are going to create that 4th record. Create contact number 4 if it exists. If not, then we have to jump in to the child number 1. Okay, so if not, create child number 1. So hopefully that's making sense up until this point, uh, but you can see how now I started to branch out. And these branches will keep going on and on and on and on. Let me actually break it down a little bit further. So after you create the contact number 4, what if there's not a 5th? You would have to now branch it out again and say if there is a— let's actually do yes, yes, No, no. So if there's a contact number, uh, number 5, you would gotta go ahead and create that contact number 5. And then if there's not a contact number 5, here's where you create the child number 1, because that's when the path, the path, uh, you know, the logic will follow. However, you can see here that now I have To create childs. So 2 steps on different paths that are essentially the same. If I keep going, that will probably appear multiple times. And the problem is, and the challenge is, that now if I have to change just one thing from that child number 1 record, I have to go into different paths to change that. So ultimately I was like, okay, This is gonna be very hard to create, very hard to manage, really hard to upload. Is there a better way? And here's what I saw it with, which I think it's going to be eye-opening if you've been trying to— if you've been struggling with something similar. So that's not the window I wanted to share. Let me find this out for you. Okay, so here's the SAP that I built for the client. In this case, we're using Paperform as the form solution and Airtable as the database. And you will notice here that I'm actually creating contact number 4 and contact number 5 and shot number 2 and shot number 3, despite those things being potentially completely empty. Right? So I'm going ahead and creating the 5 contacts in the 3 children, uh, regardless of what comes in. Um, what that might result in is actually share that. Um, this is an example. In this case, I had filled out the 5 children but not the, um, the 5 contacts. Actually, I deleted this already because I tested it a little earlier, but, um, hopefully you can understand how some of these records might be like essentially like this, empty, because there is no information about contact number 4, and I prompted or told Zapier to create those anyway. However, here's where the Magic comes in, because now what we can do is rather than having all these paths that create these records only when they're required, I can simply build them off the bat and then build paths to remove them if they're empty. So that's the idea, and that's the big aha moment I had this afternoon where I said, where I said, okay, I need to share this in case It's helpful for Google. So you can see that contact number 4 and 5, which remember those are optional, and child number 2 or 3, which again are optional, have their own paths where we can simply say if these fields are empty or do not exist, then delete the record. Now, Zapier actually doesn't have a delete record step. natively. So you have to use the API. If you've ever struggled with trying to delete a record in Zapier and you wanna know more about it, you want me to do a video on it, feel free to comment down below and I could get that so I can know you guys wanna do more about that. But that's essentially the aha moment I had this afternoon, and I thought it would be useful to create a video walking you guys How I thought about creating this in a way that's as easy to build and as easy to manage and as easy to update. So that's it for this video. If you ever wanna work with us, consider checking out the first link in the description below and consider subscribing for more videos like this. Have a nice one.