Mentor Requests Are Not Populating to Airtable

[jjhampton]

Bug Report

What is the current behavior?

Submitting the Mentor Request form from front-end at https://operationcode.org/mentor-request doesn't populate the Airtable with the request via the back-end API.

What is the expected behavior?

It should submit the mentorship request form and populate the request to the Airtable Mentor Request form

What steps did you take to get this behavior?

Went to https://operationcode.org/mentor-request, submitted a mentor request via the form

Additional Info

See front-end issue 341

[jjhampton]

Thanks for looking into this, @hpjaj .

• re: 'is there a current process for the airtable request form linking back to our current site? if yes, what is it?' - Not that I'm aware of. Sounds like the integration w/ the Airtable API might have not been built in as a feature while the new site was set up? I'm not very familiar with Rails anymore, but I scanned through the API requests_controller.rb and the rest of the back-end and didn't see any Airtable-related stuff.

• re: 'should this be converted to a feature request for the backend to expose a new endpoint that populates Airtable with the passed mentor request?' - Seems like a new feature request could work,
  but we might just want to bypass the idea of populating Airtable, since we've talking about moving mentor service requests to populate on Discourse? (issues / milestones have not been created for that idea yet). Might be a better use of resources for our back-end team as we try to phase out Airtable. @rickr might be able to weigh in on this.

Short term fix, if we merge in front-end PR 466, we can just link directly from our page to the Airtable form to let users populate Mentor Service Requests. Then we can revise our in-app form and back-end API to integrate (with either Airtable, Discourse, or anything else).

[hpjaj]

@jjhampton - Thanks. I actually removed my comment. Reason being, I mistakenly relied on GitHub's search feature, from an iPad. It returned no results for anything airtable related.

But after searching in sublime, it turns out there is a background job in the backend repo that pings airtable's API. It is triggered by an after_create callback on User.

I haven't dug in any further, but at first blush this does appear to be a bug, as you reported.

[hpjaj]

@jjhampton - as you uncovered in Slack, the AddUserToAirtablesJob background job creates a user in Airtable, not a mentor request.

We would need a new feature request for that, or one for moving to Discourse as you described above.

[hollomancer]

@jjhampton @rickr, do we want to make the web interface for mentors invisible for now, and just go straight to Discourse implementation?

[hpjaj]

Closing this issue as it was originally thought there was a bug preventing the API call to Airtable. When in fact, this functionality does not currently exist, and would/could be a future feature request.