External Collection Trouble - Unable to Create or Filter

Get Help External Collections, Custom Actions & Collections
1

Hey all!

Some backstory/context:
I’ve been creating an app in Adalo to connect with the website my devs are working on. Admin users use the website to create sports leagues, and students would use the app to register. The devs have created APIs for most actions that happen on the website. Our eventual plan is to build an app from scratch for students, but that is still some months off. I’d like to use Adalo to start getting user feedback.

The trouble I’m experiencing is that I am able to get the APIs connected to Adalo for a Get all, but I’m not able to filter results based on a certain parameter (such as league-id or division-id) or create a record. When troubleshooting with my devs, they can see the create call, but Adalo isn’t passing any information across. Our API is structured with all information nested under a Body. Here is a screenshot of the API set-up in Adalo that passes the Get All test:

Teams_API
Teams_API1512×864 44.8 KB

Have I just got the API set-up wrong? Does Adalo support the nesting mentioned earlier? If not, are there any intermediaries I should look into that would ‘translate’ the calls between Adalo and our website? I am non-technical, so I’m not even sure what I should be searching for online or within the help area or how I should be troubleshooting with our dev team. They had mentioned that based on the one call we tested with Adalo that they would have to re-write all our APIs in a weird format that they haven’t seen before, which we aren’t going to do just to make Adalo work.

Any suggestions or help would be appreciated!
Tamara

2

Hi Tamara,

Welcome to the Community! :slight_smile:

Sorry for the late response!

The issue might have to do with the API that you are using. Maybe other community members might know how to do this? @Victor @Erik

I would submit a support ticket for this issue.

3

Hi @Tamara @James_App_Maker,

This requires some investigation and knowledge about this exact API.

To start with, external collection API should have 5 endpoints, see here: External Collections with APIs - Adalo Resources

Also, as it is possible to use Magic Text in the base API requests, it opens the opportunity to have different requests based on the dynamically-set app parameters. This might be worthwhile to explore.

Another option is to explore the opportunity to use parameters for the request - do something similar to Airtable external collection.

And the final option is to use external service as a “Proxy” to “mimic” the external collectilon. I can imagine Integromat can do that, but I’ve never did it personally.

All these methods require having comprehensive info about the API and some time to experiment and explore it :slight_smile:

Best regards, Victor.