How to Delete an Airtable Record Within Zapier (Using Airtable's API)

Hey guys, this is Isaac from sapoholic.com and AppSheet.co, where we've helped over 50 clients automate their processes and workflows.

And in this video, I want to walk you through a quick tutorial on how do you go about deleting a record directly from Zapier— deleting an Airtable record, I should say, directly from Zapier. If you've ever tried to delete a record on Zapier, you might have noticed that there's actually no such action in their native integration. And this is something that we've been requesting for years, honestly, every time we sort of face something similar. But there's a way around it, and it's relatively easy to set up if you know how to just read a basic API documentation. So let's go through it. Since it's not here, you will actually have to use Airtable's API. If you don't know what an API is, an API, the way I like to explain it, it's like a login page for a robot, for a program. So you have the user interface where you see your login page, you put your credentials, you go in and click or delete or remove or add anything within that tool. And an API, it's an application program interface, which similarly a robot, you have to give it its credentials for it to access the data, delete, add, or do anything else you wanted to do. Within Airtable, what you have to know— sorry, within Zapier, what you have to know is that any API you wanna access will have to use what's called a webhook. And in this case, the method of the webhook is gonna be part of the API documentation that you want. To basically, the API documentation will tell you what methods to use. So in this case, I pick— I just open a simple table, created a record, and let's just say I wanna delete this particular record. If you go to Airtable's API, you notice that they have what's called an authentication page, which is again If we use that analogy, it's the login page. It's telling you how to log in via a webhook, essentially. And you can see here that it says— I want to get into the details, but this is a header. And in that header, there's an authorization that's better space your token. Now, just recently, Airtable is starting to phase out the traditional tokens, and they have Personal access tokens now, but I'm gonna walk you through how this is going to look like in a in Zapier. So I'm just gonna put a custom request for now, and and you're gonna see that there's a header section, and this header section will be there in all the different methods that you choose: a GET, a POST, a PUT, whatever it may be. So what the documentation is telling you that you need to have authorization here. And then you have to have Better plus your token.

So let's put Better space, and let's go ahead and hunt for an API key.

In this case, actually a token, how they're now calling it. We will go to the developer hub and we will create a token. I'm just gonna call it temporary video token, and I'm gonna make sure to give it the appropriate permissions. So we can see the data.

I want to delete records, so it should also give the right permissions.

I'm gonna create the token. It's very important that you save this if you intend to use it regularly, because this is the only time that it will show you—

show it to you.

So in this case, it's something temporary for me.

I'm not gonna worry about it, but I'm gonna put it here.

This is gonna— this is what— this is what is going to ensure that we can access the data of your account.

Because otherwise, if this wasn't a requirement, it's like your data in Airtable would be publicly available, which of course is not the right way to store data from tools like this.

So now if I go into the documentation again, Airtable's API, you're gonna see under records there's a delete record.

There's also delete multiple records.

For this example, just to keep it simple, let's say we're trying to delete a record. What you're going to see is that it's gonna tell me the method.

This is the method of the request of the webhook, and this is the URL. It's also gonna tell me if there are any parameters I need to add on top of that.

So let's go ahead and It's also telling you here what scope it needs.

We already picked that earlier.

But what I'm gonna do here is now I know the delete method is the right one. I'm gonna go ahead and copy paste this URL. Now you might notice some variables in brackets. These are things we want to change.

And if they're fixed, we are just going to copy and paste them directly from Airtable.

Now, since I've used Airtable, I know that in the URL they already have the base ID and the table ID. So you see airtable.com/— this is the base ID, this is the table ID. And if I open up the record, I'm going to see This as the record ID.

This is the view ID, in case you're wondering. So I'm gonna pick the bet the app la la la, which is the base ID, and I'm gonna pick also the TBL la la la, which is the table ID.

Now, if you were going to Have this as an actual automation that's running, you'll probably want this to be a custom variable.

Gonna show you that in a little bit.

But let's assume for this example that we just wanna make sure that this is working and we wanna test it.

I'm gonna go ahead and pick that specific record. I'm gonna put it here and I'm going to go ahead and hit continue, test the action, and let's see what happens.

Invalid permissions.

I'm a fool. What happened? Let's see authorization. It's interesting. Let's go back here real quick.

This is how the response should look like. Let's see if it has something to do with the token we just created.

It has the right thing, but it doesn't have access.

to the base itself. It seems we gave it the scope.

We don't give it the access.

Let's go ahead and give it access to the particular base that I'm using. And that was actually one of the reasons why Airtable probably started using tokens.

API, it's like API inherently has access to all of the bases you have access to.

Now I can limit the, the access to a specific base. So that makes sense. Let's go ahead and try that again. Test action. And there we have it. Deleted true.

If I go back into the table, we will see that that particular record is no longer there. Now, just to give you a quick example how you would actually set this up, because more than likely you wouldn't want to delete the same record every time.

Instead, you're gonna have a record generated before this step, and you will more than likely want to introduce here that custom record.

So it would be like introducing a record that, say, was triggered in one of the steps above. And that's how probably the webhook is going to look like in its finished version before you publish the sample.

So I hope that helped. It's just a quick tutorial I wanted to share with you.

It's just because it's something I, I see a couple of people struggling with, and I myself struggle with it. something like that in the past.

So if you have any questions, feel free to put them in the comment below. If you need any help implementing Zapier and automating the workflow and processes of your business, feel free to check out the first link in the description. And until then, have a nice one.