I ran into a frustrating bug with Bubble’s API Connector where it wasn’t sending all the parameters defined in the call.
In my case, I was uploading a file to Filestack. The API call included url, filename, and mimetype. The first two were dynamic, and I had set a default value for mimetype in both the API connector and the module.
However, mimetype wasn’t being sent at all. It didn’t show up in the Bubble logs, and the call was successful but caused issues downloading the file later on (since the type wasn’t known). After a lot of debugging, I discovered that Bubble seems to ignore parameters with default values if they aren’t changed from the default — or it treats them as blank or something else.
I eventually rebuilt the same call in Make.com, and it worked perfectly first try. So if you’re experiencing similar issues with API calls, especially when defaults are involved, this might be the cause.
That would be a bug. If we initialize with a default value and keep it there, that is the value bubble is supposed to use if we do not change it in the action or datasource that uses the api call. Unless there is some change to expected behavior, or potentially the use of ‘allow blank’ is checked, but any default value left unchanged, whether private or not, whether ‘allow blank’ or not should use the default value as set in the api connector.
Yeah, the API Connector has quite a few quirks, idiosyncrasies, confusing nomenclature, and as you point out, downright bugs. (I don’t have time right now to enumerate the ones I’m aware of, but maybe they’ll show up in a blog post someday.) Ironically, I’ve also seen workarounds recommended which technically shouldn’t work but do only because the plugin is bugged. Plus, the UI leaves much to be desired. In my opinion, the API Connector should be rewritten from scratch.
The good news is that since it’s a plugin, it could be left in place while an entirely separate plugin is developed as an alternative. Bubble devs could migrate at their leisure as time permits (or not at all, and just use the new one for new projects).
I know the Bubble engineers have a lot on their plate, but given the importance of APIs and 3rd party integrations, it’d be great if this was a priority sooner rather than later.
I’d love to create my own API connector! However, plugins created by bubble use a different editor than what we have … So we can’t recreate the API connector UI
Yeah, a new API Connector plugin would have to be created by Bubble. Either that OR give us the ability to build more powerful plugins with full control over the plugin’s editor UI so that the community could create an API Connector alternative. How cool would that be.
