Integrating Airtable data with Twilio Autopilot: How to fetch and present info to users?

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1

Hey everyone, I’m working on a Twilio Autopilot project and I’m stuck. I’ve got the first part working where I collect a date from the user. Now I want to use that date to look up info in my Airtable database. The tricky part is getting that info back to the user in a nice format.

I’ve got some code that connects to Airtable, but I’m not sure how to use the data it gives me. Here’s what I’ve got so far:

function getMovieInfo(date, callback) {
  const Airtable = require('airtable');
  const base = new Airtable({apiKey: 'mykey'}).base('mybase');

  base('Movies').select({
    filterByFormula: `{Date} = '${date}'`
  }).firstPage((err, records) => {
    if (err) {
      console.error(err);
      return callback(err);
    }
    const record = records[0];
    callback(null, record.fields);
  });
}

Any ideas on how to take this info and format it for the user? I want to say something like “On [date], the Main Theater is playing [movie1], and the Other Theater is playing [movie2]”. Thanks for any help!

2

I’ve tackled similar integration challenges, and here’s what worked for me. Instead of using callbacks, consider refactoring your getMovieInfo function to return a Promise. This approach allows for cleaner, more readable code when handling asynchronous operations.

Here’s a quick example of how you might restructure your function:

async function getMovieInfo(date) {
  const base = new Airtable({apiKey: 'mykey'}).base('mybase');
  const records = await base('Movies').select({
    filterByFormula: `{Date} = '${date}'`
  }).firstPage();
  
  return records[0].fields;
}

Then, in your Autopilot task, you can use async/await to fetch and format the data:

let movieData = await getMovieInfo(date);
let response = `On ${date}, the Main Theater is playing ${movieData.MainTheater}, and the Other Theater is playing ${movieData.OtherTheater}.`;

This approach has made my code more maintainable and easier to debug. Hope this helps!

3

yo olivias, i’ve dealt with this before. u can use template literals to format ur response. like this:

On ${date}, the Main Theater is playing ${record.fields.MainTheater}, and the Other Theater is playing ${record.fields.OtherTheater}.

just make sure ur field names match whats in airtable. good luck!

4

I’ve encountered a similar challenge in my projects. One approach is to modify your getMovieInfo function to return a Promise, which then allows you to use async/await in your Autopilot task for handling the asynchronous Airtable query. Separating the concerns by creating a dedicated function to format the response makes the code more maintainable and easier to test. For example, you could implement a formatting function like this:

function formatMovieResponse(date, movieData) {
  return `On ${date}, the Main Theater is playing ${movieData.MainTheater}, and the Other Theater is playing ${movieData.OtherTheater}.`;
}

This approach has worked well for me in similar integrations.