Get action details and needs
Get details of a specific action, including its needs, gives, and a sample of the action.
“Needs” are the values that need to be provided when the action is run. Needs that are not provided will be guessed by the AI when the action is run.
”Gives” are the values that the action returns when it is run.
”Sample” is a sample of what the action returns when it is run.
When you Run a stateless action, “needs” are provided to the endpoint. For each need, you can either have AI guess a value for it or you can ask the user to provide a specific value.
Custom fields
The list of needs that this returns can change based on the params
provided in the request body.
As such, this endpoint may need to be hit multiple times as needs are chosen by the user.
This endpoint needs to be hit again whenever the selected value for a need changes and any of the following are true:
- The changed need has
alters_custom_fields
set totrue
- The changed need is in the
depends_on
array of another need - The changed need has
custom_field
set totrue
As an example, when using the GoogleSheetsV2API
API with the add_row
action, the first time you get the action you will get back these action_needs
:
In order to get the column names of the spreadsheet, you’ll have to get the prefill choices. See Get Prefill Choices for more information.
In this example scenario, after getting values for the spreadsheet
and worksheet
prefills, another call can be made to this endpoint.
This time, in the body of the POST
, we can include the selected values:
Now, the action details will include the columns from the spreadsheet as custom fields:
Choices
If the need has a choices
array, then the value being chosen should come from that list.
Often, you will see this with boolean
fields.
For example, the SlackAPI
API’s direct_message
action contains the following need (irrelevant fields removed):
Other field types
See Field definitions and types in the Zapier Platform documentation for details on the other types of fields that a need can have.
Authorizations
The access token received from the authorization server in the OAuth 2.0 flow.
Path Parameters
The app that the action belongs to.
The action to get details for.
Query Parameters
The type of the action to get details for.
This can be:
write
: Actions that have side effects (such as sending an email or updating a spreadsheet)search
: Actions that return results (such as searching for a contact or getting a list of emails)
read
, write
, search
, read_bulk
The Zapier account ID to use.
Account IDs available to the user can be listed using the Get Account List endpoint
ID of the authentication to use for the app.
Authentications available to the user can be listed using the List Authentications For App endpoint.
What kind of information to return with the action details.
List of:
action_needs
: Include the needs of the action. These are what are provided when running the action.action_gives
: Include the gives of the action. These are what the action returns when it runs.action_sample
: Include a sample of the action. Note: This will dramatically slow down the response from this endpoint. Only use it if you really need the sample.
action_needs
, action_gives
, action_sample
Body
A dictionary of key-value pairs, where the key is a need
key and the value is a selected value for that need.