It’s typically better to do this through the Custom Actions rather than the External Collections in Adalo. It’s also important that your API call does not send null (empty) fields and that the values you are sending match the data types in Airtable. For instance, numbers sent to number fields, text send to text and single select fields, and boolean values sent to checkbox fields, etc.
External collections can be used like this, but custom actions are able to be placed on buttons not related to a specific data item as well. You can also more easily setup different query parameters without affecting the function of the overall collection.