Action buttons SYNC or ASYNC?

Hey folks,

Question to the amazing folks at Softr about the upcoming action buttons.

Will these buttons be able to query REST APIs, and if so - will the UX you’re building allow for the request response to come back and refresh the block?

Again, just thinking about the user experience where folks don’t have to refresh the page in order to see updates in the block.

Cheers,

Eugene

Hi @eugene the first version of action buttons will be released very soon and initially will be around existing CRUD functionalities there it will do auto-refresh. REST API calls will come after the first release as a separate functionality and there we need to learn a bit about use cases and refresh or not will be dependent on the API calls themselves like what are they doing… If you don’t mind pls share what’s your use case about.

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Sure. User inputs something into a form; the data is picked up by a Make workflow, which terminates by depositing the outputs to Airtable. I’d like to be able to display the output to the user dynamically - without the user having to refresh the page. E.g. as soon as there’s a new/updated record, the block shows it immediately.

Ideally, show some form of progress indication to the user while the workflow is running (e.g. a spinner/loader in the row).

Eugene

Specific use cases are manipulations of user input with various OpenAI functions, but the could be countless other use cases where we extend Softr’s functionalities by manipulating user inputs with workflows external to Softr. Right now, users would have to refresh the page to see the updates in Airtable. Ideally, it would happen in real time.

@artur any thoughts? :slight_smile:

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It seems this is a challenge due to fact that the processing that happens on make is async and we don’t know when it will be done ?

But the end-destination of the Make workflow is still the Airtable table. Can your dynamic list blocks be configured so that the block auto-refreshes when data changes in Airtable? The rest we can work around.

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We could have a code snippet that reloads every X seconds until the desired outcome is there ?

Reloads the whole page, that is?

Hey, @artur! Any timeline for “very soon”? I’m waiting for this amazing feature to avoid building a convoluted process where users can post mp3 files to get transcribed.

Can one of you pls DM your app and magic link so and bit of info on the flow ? then I can go in there try see the issue, fix it and share the code :slight_smile:

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For my use case if the user has to refresh the block is still useful. Do you have any date aboutwhen it will be released?

Thanks

@artur Apparently, Airtable has launched a Webhooks API that send notifications when the data changes. Surely, you guys would be able to use these webhooks to sync List blocks with Airtable data in real time? e.g. without users having to refresh the page?

It’s an opportunity to look at but not very trivial, given there are filters, paging, etc. With streaming data those are common case like trading data not sure here yet but we are thinking whats possible