Structuring a delete function using Zapier

Knack Community
1

I understand why a records based charge model means that having the ability to remove records is commercially damaging. Despite this I do need to find a way to remove records from my knack.com app because otherwise it is not commercially viable and also opens up liability in respect of things like retention policies under GDPR.

I has dealt with the issue of GDPR quite nicely using a date stamp plus x days on records that are added to the system and a task that goes through each of those records and clears the data values in them one that date has been reached.

While I can do manual deleting by hand, if there was a way to automate this using zapier that would be great as a fallback.

I have done some pretty intense API connections with Zapier but am having a roadblock when thinking about how to sequence this with zapier.

My trigger choices are:

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What I am thinking is that I am going to need to create a stand-alone table that’s function is to ping Zapier when a specific condition has been met, in this case the condition is that the record has met the criteria for deletion.

Anyone got any inspiration for how I can make this run on an existing table where all the main data is stored?

Cheers

2

Hello, the easiest way is to use make.com.
Make.com offers the ability to delete records.

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3

@GSH - You may find this of some help / inspiration

Managing Cascading Deletes in Knack
Step-by-Step Tutorial!

4

Hi @GSH

We use make to put about 150 to 200 records into one field and we do this for multiple objects, this means we can covert 1000’s of records into 1 record. We use Make to do this but Zapier could do it too.

We basically loop through each record and each record becomes 1 line of a table which then gets put back into Knack into 1 rich text field. Once the data is stored we delete all the original data. The really nice thing about this is that using Knack’s classes you can make it look like a normal grid when viewed on the front end.

The trigger we use is a form submit but you could use a search trigger too and run it periodically.

If you’d like more info please get in touch. It’s a fairly straightforward setup once you’ve done it once.

Craig

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5

Thanks both these were really helpful. Will try option 1 for now before making option 2 if things go well and I can’t afford the API credits!

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