+7Hello everyone,
I have a base with 12 tables and a few plain text and rich text fields in each.
I’m looking for a way to find and replace the name of my company everywhere (any table, any field).
The marketplace script only lets me choose one field in one table at a time…
Thanks a lot for your help.
Joachim
+29Are you looking for …
I do not know if (a) or (e) exist. There is a possibility that (b) exists, but I couldn’t say for sure.
If you are interested in (c), please post where you are in the process, and someone will probably help. There are many people on these forums who enjoy helping people help themselves.
If you are interested in (d), consider posting in the “hire a consultant” section, or otherwise let people know.
+7Well to be honest, my need seemed to be so general i thought someone would certainly have done it already. :grinning_face_with_sweat:
I’ve been using airtable for a few months, the only times i’ve needed to write a script was to trigger webhooks.
I’ll give it a shot next week unless someone shares another solution in the meantime.
Thanks for answering
+29Well to be honest, my need seemed to be so general i thought someone would certainly have done it already. :grinning_face_with_sweat:
I’ve been using airtable for a few months, the only times i’ve needed to write a script was to trigger webhooks.
I’ll give it a shot next week unless someone shares another solution in the meantime.
Thanks for answering
It quite possibly is. But then again, it might not be. It is hard to say. And while some people give away a lot of code, there is no knowing for sure if anyone has or is interested in giving away this particular bit of code.
Maybe someone will see this thread and post the code you need. If not, I hope you enjoy writing your own. Scripting can be very empowering.
+7You are totally right, I try sharing all the code I can for airtable-powered websites on my softr code snippet library.
Yeah, this would be useful, and I also have never seen such a utility. This is in the class of “utility”, and users tend to not pay for utilities, so this is one of those features that fall onto Airtable’s shoulders. Also, any code that does this should be regarded as a chainsaw capable of serious injury to your data. This is probably yet another reason the aftermarket hasn’t tried to tackle it; it’s simply too risky to expose ways to devastate a database.
+21@Bill.French makes some great points, as always. After reading this thread the other day, I spent a little time and wrote a script that does this global search-and-replace. It works pretty well, but after something that I noticed in testing combined with Bill’s comments, I’m not certain about releasing it.
What I noticed was that while the global change was successful, trying to undo that change was not. Long story short, a manual undo only affected one field in one record across the two tables where the change was made by the script, and it didn’t always undo the change actually made by the script. In my latest test, it treated the post-replace text as something that I’d manually typed, and the undo operations removed that text and never showed what was in the field pre-replace.
I can see a more robust tool (i.e. a custom extension) that includes its own internal undo queue as one way to possibly mitigate the potential risk of such an effort, but would that be enough to make it “safe”? I’m not sure.
@Bill.French makes some great points, as always. After reading this thread the other day, I spent a little time and wrote a script that does this global search-and-replace. It works pretty well, but after something that I noticed in testing combined with Bill’s comments, I’m not certain about releasing it.
What I noticed was that while the global change was successful, trying to undo that change was not. Long story short, a manual undo only affected one field in one record across the two tables where the change was made by the script, and it didn’t always undo the change actually made by the script. In my latest test, it treated the post-replace text as something that I’d manually typed, and the undo operations removed that text and never showed what was in the field pre-replace.
I can see a more robust tool (i.e. a custom extension) that includes its own internal undo queue as one way to possibly mitigate the potential risk of such an effort, but would that be enough to make it “safe”? I’m not sure.
Yep - this is a cool idea waiting for a lawsuit. Make sure your ommissions and errors policy premiums are fully paid. :winking_face:
The undo is but one of many issues, and since undo requires a new set of changes to the base; it is itself ostensibly the top side of the chainsaw blade spinning just as fast and in the opposite direction. The undo is equally capable of devastating errors if not a perfect piece of engineering and a near-perfect operator.
This (as Steve Jobs would say) is an intractable problem; there are no clear pathways to hyper-profits without great risk. This is why I believe if it ever happens, it will be Airtable engineers who do it.
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