We are using a read only Asana "Project" to manage our design work. Our design work is organized as Asana Tasks. Each Task represents a different design project. The reason for making it read only is to limit Asana users from accidentally making changes to the project details and to restrict Asana users from creating their own tasks that fall outside of the Task standard structure that we have decided on.
To create these tasks in Asana we are using a combination of Cognito forms and Zapier to create the tasks automatically. Our customer fills out the Cognito form and Zapier automatically populates Asana with the design Task that needs to be completed for that specific customer.
The issue with this setup is that to move the tasks around in Asana to provide the team with "updates", either an Asana user with write privileges needs to do it, or the Asana user needs to fill out a form to make the change, since they only have read privileges. We would prefer to keep it super simple and I have figured out a way to do it using Zapier webhooks.
Because we are using Zapier, I can format URL links in any sort of way I want. I can create a URL link that includes the Asana Task ID and the Asana section that the task needs to be moved to. Using webhooks, a user can click a "Change Section" URL. Clicking this URL will trigger a Zapier Zap action which then will change the Asana Task Section. Just by clicking the link a User can make updates to that task.
My question is fairly basic. Is there a way to stop the URL from opening a page but for the data in the URL to be still passed to Zapier? When a user clicks the link it opens a web page and I don't want that to happen. Or if it happens, could the web page immediately close after opening?
The short answers is "no, it's not possible to click on a zapier link and have the page not open or auto-close" out of the box.
The long answer is a little more involved. I'm assuming your url looks something like https://hooks.zapier.com/hooks/catch/1234/abcd?name=john&cool=true, allowing you to pass "name" and "cool" into Zapier.
To pass that into Zapier, you need to get the contents of that URL, either by loading it in a web browser or calling it with another tool (such as fetch or curl).
If you've got some engineering resources, you could host a very simple HTML page somewhere that could accept data and run some Javascript. It would do something like:
await fetch(thatUrl)window.close() only works if the script opened the page (docs).So that's an ok workaround.