How to fetch Airtable records in Twilio Autopilot and display data to users?

Other Questions Airtable
1

I’m working with Twilio Autopilot and need help with data retrieval. My bot uses a Collect action to get a date input from users (like Feb 15, 2019). After getting this date, I want to query my Airtable database to find the matching record and show the results back to the user.

The response should be something like “on Feb 15 the Cinema A is showing this film, Cinema B is showing that movie”.

I have this code for connecting to Airtable but I’m stuck on how to extract the returned information and use it in my response:

exports.handler = function(context, event, callback) {
    var AirtableAPI = require('airtable');
    var database = new AirtableAPI({apiKey: 'my_api_key'}).base('my_base_id');
    
    database('Schedule').find('rec123ABC456DEF', function(error, data) {
        if (error) { 
            console.error(error); 
            return; 
        }
        console.log(data);
    });
}

The Airtable response looks like this:

{
    "id": "rec123ABC456DEF",
    "fields": {
        "Date": "2019-02-15",
        "Cinema A": "Iron Man",
        "Cinema B": "Spider-Man"
    },
    "createdTime": "2019-02-15T18:30:22.000Z"
}

How can I extract the field values and pass them back to the user through Autopilot?

2

just grab the fields in your callback, like let cinemaA = data.fields['Cinema A'] and let cinemaB = data.fields['Cinema B']. then create your response using those variables and send it back to Autopilot!

3

You need to properly structure your callback function to return the response to Autopilot. After extracting the field values as mentioned, you should construct a Twilio response object. Here’s what your handler should look like:

exports.handler = function(context, event, callback) {
    var AirtableAPI = require('airtable');
    var database = new AirtableAPI({apiKey: 'my_api_key'}).base('my_base_id');
    
    database('Schedule').find('rec123ABC456DEF', function(error, data) {
        if (error) { 
            console.error(error);
            callback(error);
            return; 
        }
        
        const cinemaA = data.fields['Cinema A'];
        const cinemaB = data.fields['Cinema B'];
        const date = data.fields['Date'];
        
        const responseMessage = `On ${date}, Cinema A is showing ${cinemaA}, Cinema B is showing ${cinemaB}`;
        
        callback(null, {
            actions: [{
                say: responseMessage
            }]
        });
    });
}

The key part is using the callback function with the proper Autopilot response format containing the actions array.