This would show the last known table schema and data that was shown, but would allow to make records and sync when the mobile device comes back online. Issues would be resolved via the web to validate issues.
Are you a world traveler? US and Canada, east coast.
Do you use Airtable alone, or with collaborators? With a few collaborators. A rather historically fraught term, btw. Can’t we say "associates?"
How much do you need to be able to do in Airtable while offline? Ability to edit.
Do you need to have the ability to change the database schemata while offline? Ehhh, not that big a deal.
For how long do you need to be able to use Airtable offline? For a few days, as I trek through the not so remote reaches of the maritime provinces.
How tolerant would you be of having to resolve merge conflicts manually? Somewhat tolerant. In fact, probably necessary if we’re both changing the same inventory.
Would you primarily be using offline mode on desktop or mobile? Mobile.
Hello! Recent convert, love the product so far. If this feature is still under consideration:
1. How would you want to use Airtable offline?
I’m a web developer, and as such I like to do much of my planning and proposal writing online. For the most part this works fine, but you wouldn’t believe how many meetings I’ve been in to demonstrate my product, only to have the meeting take place in an environment with no Internet connection. Restaurants, tech-backwards offices, waterfalls – you name it.
Obviously I’m not requesting you create offline versions of my websites (though I wouldn’t object if you did :imp: ). But I currently do write my proposals on my website – a strategy which, for its many advantages, leaves me at a significant impasse without the Internet. If Airtable supported an offline mode, building a connection via API between my website’s backend and Airtable would be relatively simple, allowing me to upload my proposals and present them while offline without fear.
2. Do you use Airtable alone, or with collaborators?
I work with one other person for now – though I could foresee that growing as time goes on. So, the latter.
3. How much do you need to be able to do in Airtable while offline?
For my use case, I’d just need read-only privileges. The only important part for me is being able to show my proposals to relevant parties regardless of Internet connection. I can take meeting notes separately and incorporate them into the database later.
4. For how long do you need to be able to use Airtable offline?
A couple hours, at most. Most of the time shorter than that.
5. How tolerant would you be of having to resolve merge conflicts manually?
Personally I’d be fine with that – Git is a regular part of my workflow so I’m familiar with the process.
6. Would you primarily be using offline mode on desktop or mobile?
Honestly, either would be helpful. Mobile would probably be ever-so-slightly more helpful, as I try and bring my laptop to all meetings but there’s some instances where it’s not feasible.
+1 Vote for this feature request. I use Airtable on my mobile phone when I go to remote areas in the Philippines where there is no mobile phone signal. Airtable helps me keep track the products and prepare the invoice for my customers (billing and budgeting purposes for the customer). This is a window of a couple of hours since I return to my home base wherein I have good internet signal. The offline mode with syncing would be “bridge the gap” of those couple of hours wherein there are only a few INSERTs and UPDATEs on the records needs to be synced up in the cloud.
How would you want to use Airtable offline?
One real-life example: My recipe collection is in Airtable; sometimes I need to check a list of ingredients while I’m in the grocery store, and for whatever reason, the store’s roof tends to block cellular access pretty effectively.
Do you use Airtable alone, or with collaborators?
Alone.
How much do you need to be able to do in Airtable while offline?
Read-only access is probably sufficient for my purposes.
How tolerant would you be of having to resolve merge conflicts manually?
Willing to do this if necessary — but if I’m the only one accessing the data, and especially if access is read-only, then I anticipate this won’t be necessary often, if ever.
Would you primarily be using offline mode on desktop or mobile?
Mobile, exclusively.
Howie wrote:
CEO of Airtable here. Thanks everyone for your feedback so far!
I’ll address joshua_soule’s question, which I interpret as/distill into “can offline read/write access be thought of in the same way as online collaboration, but with exaggerated latency.” The answer is: not entirely.
Some Airtable user actions, such as editing a cell or creating/deleting new rows, are performed immediately on the client’s local data representation (see related concepts of “optimistic UI updating,” “optimistic concurrency,” and “eventual consistency”). Thus, they could theoretically be performed offline. In fact, you can do so today by disconnecting your internet connection without closing the browser tab or the iOS/Android app, making changes, then reconnecting—in absence of any conflicting changes from other clients, your offline edits should seamlessly sync.
The problem is that if changes are made from multiple clients simultaneously—whether by a team collaborator, or yourself from multiple offline devices—these clients increasingly diverge in their local states. In other words, if the Airtable server is the “real world,” each client gets more and more carried away with their imagination and starts to construct their own alternate reality. (Actually, this problem would remain even if you took away the Airtable server and instead made the system peer to peer, at which point you would have to grapple with consensus determination, which becomes increasingly complicated as the data model becomes more sophisticated, i.e. an entire relational database instead of simple numerical values).
Some amount of (or more accurately, “some types of”) divergence can be cleanly merged together: for instance, if you and I edit completely different cell values without making any other changes. In these cases, it’s obvious that our intended changes are completely independent of each other and can be trivially resolved. (For some very simple data structures, you can even construct a highly limited “world” where changes can always be cleanly merged together, but this doesn’t work for more sophisticated applications).
However, this isn’t always true. In some cases, our respective intents come into conflict. Within these cases, it’s sometimes still easy for Airtable to arbitrate our dispute and make a decision on what the outcome should be—in the case of two people overwriting the same cell value, the last edit received by the server wins. Note that for many cell types, Airtable’s behavior is actually a bit more advanced than “last-edit-wins”. For instance, if a multi select cell contains options Albatross and Buzzard, and you remove option Albatross from the cell (thus locally believing the resultant state to be Buzzard) while I simultaneously add option Cockatoo to the multi select cell (thus locally believing the resultant state to be Albatross, Buzzard, Cockatoo), Airtable actually resolves the resultant state to Buzzard and Cockatoo so that both of our intents are preserved, rather than simply clobbering one of our changes with the other .
Sometimes, though, there’s no clear way (not just for Airtable, but on a theoretical level) to resolve the conflicting intents—if one user changes a column, and another simultaneously changes values in the old column, for instance, it’s unclear what the human-desirable outcome is. One of the users’ intents must prevail (at least partially) over the other’s. This is where having 2 seconds of online latency is different from 2 days of latency (i.e. offline mode). With 2 seconds of latency, the most work you’ll lose or need to manually re-perform is 2 seconds. With 2 days of latency, you could potentially lose up to 2 days of work, as your subsequent changes could depend on the first change, which will be rejected. In other words, offline mode prevents you as the user from getting near-realtime feedback that a change being rejected due to another client’s conflicting changes, and instead lets you spiral increasingly into an invalid world of local state which becomes growingly impossible to resolve with the other clients’ world(s).
As far as I know, there are no database systems that gracefully handle all of the above problems. (Airtable is the first end-user relational database that handles fully realtime collaboration). We do believe this is an important feature, but there are necessarily tradeoffs to be made in its design. Your detailed feedback will help guide us to design the right tradeoffs.
Hi,
Thanks for the detailed explanation, as this is critical feature for me and reading your post give me impression that it may be possible for you to allow a locked-down version be saved on device and then that snapshot will work off-line.
Once that device having locked down version becomes on-line again then let it not-sync rather present a list of conflicting changes requiring them to be approved.
Reading all I think if you implement some thing which will work for single user while offline then it will solve problem for lot of people. In my particular case we are in National Park with no mobile/internet connection nor there is any hope.
In old days when only connection was Dial-up the POS systems would at the end of the
day dial-into each location from head-office, collect the file for all changes made at that location during working hours. Head office would merge all to main server then create a new file for each location that got applied to the store POS. In morning Head office would run reports for previous days activity and store would have updated data.
Apart from sales and request for inventory update there were transfer between stores, which also got processed this way.
I think if you can put a lock on instant update thing, let folks be bit more patient then a solution could be found. Let one user be designated as Admin and his/her changes or those approved by Admin will prevail. Each user can decide how long they want to be offline the merge file will be created for that duration… Then for that duration you create transactions/changes file for each user and then merge them [ after all
who made changes to structure ack ] them with the snapshot, approve then merge.
Hope this may help you to provide even a limited [ single user / Admin ] offline capability.
+1 vote
How would you want to use Airtable offline?
Personal use for the listing of students, their presence and performance and some other personal app
Do you use Airtable alone, or with collaborators?
Alone most often, sometimes sharing with my assistant.
How much do you need to be able to do in Airtable while offline?
Read-only access is good, editing posssibilities would be great.
How tolerant would you be of having to resolve merge conflicts manually?
Resolving conflicts manually would be OK.
Would you primarily be using offline mode on desktop or mobile?
Mobile, exclusively.
+2Does not appear to work. Turning on airplane mode yields spinning circle. I’m guessing a copy of the data is not cached, which seems logical to me, especially for large bases.
RobTX wrote:
Does not appear to work. Turning on airplane mode yields spinning circle. I’m guessing a copy of the data is not cached, which seems logical to me, especially for large bases.
Hey Rob, had not thought about trying that… thanks for the info.
Guess I will have to continue my Xamarin integration :frowning:
How would you want to use Airtable offline?
I use it to manage short film productions. Therefore offline mode would be super great to update database as needed when on location without internet.
Do you use Airtable alone, or with collaborators?
Mostly alone and/or with small teams.
How much do you need to be able to do in Airtable while offline?
Everything it can already do as if you were working alone.
How tolerant would you be of having to resolve merge conflicts manually?
Resolving conflicts manually would be ok
Would you primarily be using offline mode on desktop or mobile?
I would primarily use offline mode on my laptop (meaning as a desktop app but on locations that are not necessarily connected to the internet). I find that editing on small screens like phone or tablets is cumbersome but it can be useful for occasional consultation if need be.
I dont’ know what are the technical limitations you would face to make the app work as a regular desktop app. But I would gladly pay for such a regular desktop app even though that means I cannot work on DB with collaborators.
Easily my number one feature request. I travel a lot and would LOVE to get some Airtable work done while I do it. I run into this limitation weekly.
+4I would like to predominantly work offline .
I would collect field data in remote locations on ipad and help clients implement similar solutions. I am using other platforms that enable this for now. Airtable remains a test bed.
Collaborate with 5 per base.
Conflicts are ok if there is a smooth interface for addressing them.
There would be zaps related to records being created.
+1
Hi, I use Airtable since two weeks and I am greatly impressed after years of frustrated use of other Apps. The only thing I miss is temporary offline access.
How would you want to use Airtable offline?
Reading. Creating new records. Editing. 1. In my work in the field with collegues with an international charity Organisation in Latin America and Europe. 2. Private, with Friends for hiking and Outdoor activities (Shared Travel diary).
Do you use Airtable alone, or with collaborators?
I use it with 2 collaborators, Potentially up to 12.
How much do you need to be able to do in Airtable while offline?
Mostly for 8-10 Hours, sometimes for 2-3 days. Mostly, I’d like to be able to create records and edit. No need to change forma, filters or structures.
How tolerant would you be of having to resolve merge conflicts manually? tolerant. I (the User) should be informed that edits of different Records may cause conflicts.
There is a question you didn’t asked: How tolerant would collaborators be if a Record is temporally “read only”? I think, very tolerant. An Option that the owner or Write Access-collaborators can set a record in “offline edit-Mode” would reduce significantly the Airtable CEO’s nightmare of Sync conflicts.
Would you primarily be using offline mode on desktop or mobile? Mobile on both iPad and android phone.
As cool and seductive as Airtable is, the FIRST question I asked myself was “can this app work offline?”
Google brought me to this thread. LOL
Simple example:
- Create a “Team Directory” with phone numbers of all involved.
- You want to CALL someone, but have NO Internet.
- Game OVER for AirTable
I need this too. I am often in areas with poor connection or in a notspot. The more I am using it, the more I rely on it and consequently the bigger the problem is when I don’t have access to it.
It really is key to me.
Katherine_Duh wrote:
Hi, everyone! First off, we hear you loud and clear on the desire for offline mode. We’ve spent much time internally exploring the possibility of offline mode (and even building some prototypes), but it’s a fundamentally difficult feature to build. Since Airtable is a collaborative product, an ideal offline solution would need to gracefully handle merge conflicts, and do so in the context of Airtable’s relational data structure and rich field types. For comparison, Google Docs uses an approach termed operational transforms, but this only works on simpler data structures (i.e. a Google word document is represented as a single long string of text, and a spreadsheet is represented as a shapeless 2-dimensional array of cells).
As we continue to explore the tradeoffs for various implementations of offline mode, it would be very useful for our team to get some detailed feedback from dedicated Airtable users like yourselves about why and how you would like offline to be designed. Just a sampling of potential things to think about:
- How would you want to use Airtable offline? Tell us your story. Are you a world traveler, wanting to find a way to look at your elaborately designed base of sightseeing spots without having to pay exorbitant roaming charges? Are you a construction baron, sending out remote workers to to survey your newly acquired plots of land? Are you a deep sea diver on a solo expedition in the Marianas Trench, logging undiscovered species of hagfish on the ocean floor? Do you just have really terrible WiFi in the boiler room under the stairs, where the boss moved your office?
- Do you use Airtable alone, or with collaborators? (Resolving merge conflicts when someone is the sole collaborator on a database is far simpler than doing so when you have multiple collaborators, some of whom are online and some of whom are offline, and all of whom are editing different things.)
- How much do you need to be able to do in Airtable while offline? Do you just need a read-only version of the contents of your bases that you can access while offline? Or do you need to have the ability to edit the contents of records while offline? Or do you need to have the ability to change the database schemata while offline? (In order, these are: comparatively simple to implement; difficult to implement; incredibly difficult to implement.)
- For how long do you need to be able to use Airtable offline? For a few minutes, as you drive through a tunnel? (Please don’t Airtable and drive.) For a few hours, as you sit in an airport terminal and refuse to pay for overpriced WiFi? For a few weeks, as you trek through the farthest reaches of frigid Nunavut?
- How tolerant would you be of having to resolve merge conflicts manually? One potential way of alleviating the issues that arise with resolving merge conflicts is to force end users to make decisions on how to solve specific conflicts. This, however, comes with its own set of potential problems (e.g. being stalled by having to resolve a merge conflict when all you want to do is work, your co-workers getting mad that you merged over their data without their permission).
- Would you primarily be using offline mode on desktop or mobile? Anecdotally, it seems like many of the people who want offline mode want it for mobile, but it would be good for us to get some clarification on that front.
I need AT for inspections where the database set up is not going to change but would need to update records with data from the field.
I would be using it with one or two collaborators at most.
I need to use it offline for about an hour or two each day.
I would not be tolerant resolving conflicts at all.
I’m thinking of, as others have suggested, an offline mode that would sync changes one reconnected. Again only records updating with NO changes to structure or relationships is what I need.
Hope this helps!
Katherine_Duh wrote:
Hi, everyone! First off, we hear you loud and clear on the desire for offline mode. We’ve spent much time internally exploring the possibility of offline mode (and even building some prototypes), but it’s a fundamentally difficult feature to build. Since Airtable is a collaborative product, an ideal offline solution would need to gracefully handle merge conflicts, and do so in the context of Airtable’s relational data structure and rich field types. For comparison, Google Docs uses an approach termed operational transforms, but this only works on simpler data structures (i.e. a Google word document is represented as a single long string of text, and a spreadsheet is represented as a shapeless 2-dimensional array of cells).
As we continue to explore the tradeoffs for various implementations of offline mode, it would be very useful for our team to get some detailed feedback from dedicated Airtable users like yourselves about why and how you would like offline to be designed. Just a sampling of potential things to think about:
- How would you want to use Airtable offline? Tell us your story. Are you a world traveler, wanting to find a way to look at your elaborately designed base of sightseeing spots without having to pay exorbitant roaming charges? Are you a construction baron, sending out remote workers to to survey your newly acquired plots of land? Are you a deep sea diver on a solo expedition in the Marianas Trench, logging undiscovered species of hagfish on the ocean floor? Do you just have really terrible WiFi in the boiler room under the stairs, where the boss moved your office?
- Do you use Airtable alone, or with collaborators? (Resolving merge conflicts when someone is the sole collaborator on a database is far simpler than doing so when you have multiple collaborators, some of whom are online and some of whom are offline, and all of whom are editing different things.)
- How much do you need to be able to do in Airtable while offline? Do you just need a read-only version of the contents of your bases that you can access while offline? Or do you need to have the ability to edit the contents of records while offline? Or do you need to have the ability to change the database schemata while offline? (In order, these are: comparatively simple to implement; difficult to implement; incredibly difficult to implement.)
- For how long do you need to be able to use Airtable offline? For a few minutes, as you drive through a tunnel? (Please don’t Airtable and drive.) For a few hours, as you sit in an airport terminal and refuse to pay for overpriced WiFi? For a few weeks, as you trek through the farthest reaches of frigid Nunavut?
- How tolerant would you be of having to resolve merge conflicts manually? One potential way of alleviating the issues that arise with resolving merge conflicts is to force end users to make decisions on how to solve specific conflicts. This, however, comes with its own set of potential problems (e.g. being stalled by having to resolve a merge conflict when all you want to do is work, your co-workers getting mad that you merged over their data without their permission).
- Would you primarily be using offline mode on desktop or mobile? Anecdotally, it seems like many of the people who want offline mode want it for mobile, but it would be good for us to get some clarification on that front.
Hey @Katherine_Duh, thanks for giving us the chance to help with our stories!
Keep up the good work.
How would you want to use Airtable offline?
I use airtable to organize pretty much everything at work (non-profit social entrepreneur)
Do you use Airtable alone, or with collaborators?
Alone for now / 3 collaborators when I manage to convince them to sign up…
How much do you need to be able to do in Airtable while offline?
I’d like to create and edit records just like I do when I’m connected (including formulas :smiling_imp: )
For how long do you need to be able to use Airtable offline?
Since I don’t collaborate much on airtable, I don’t have any preference.
How tolerant would you be of having to resolve merge conflicts manually?
As much as you guys need to get it working :slightly_smiling_face:
Would you primarily be using offline mode on desktop or mobile?
I spend a decent amount of time in trains and areas with a poor connection, so mobile and desktop would be great! But I can settle for desktop.
Katherine_Duh wrote:
Hi, everyone! First off, we hear you loud and clear on the desire for offline mode. We’ve spent much time internally exploring the possibility of offline mode (and even building some prototypes), but it’s a fundamentally difficult feature to build. Since Airtable is a collaborative product, an ideal offline solution would need to gracefully handle merge conflicts, and do so in the context of Airtable’s relational data structure and rich field types. For comparison, Google Docs uses an approach termed operational transforms, but this only works on simpler data structures (i.e. a Google word document is represented as a single long string of text, and a spreadsheet is represented as a shapeless 2-dimensional array of cells).
As we continue to explore the tradeoffs for various implementations of offline mode, it would be very useful for our team to get some detailed feedback from dedicated Airtable users like yourselves about why and how you would like offline to be designed. Just a sampling of potential things to think about:
- How would you want to use Airtable offline? Tell us your story. Are you a world traveler, wanting to find a way to look at your elaborately designed base of sightseeing spots without having to pay exorbitant roaming charges? Are you a construction baron, sending out remote workers to to survey your newly acquired plots of land? Are you a deep sea diver on a solo expedition in the Marianas Trench, logging undiscovered species of hagfish on the ocean floor? Do you just have really terrible WiFi in the boiler room under the stairs, where the boss moved your office?
- Do you use Airtable alone, or with collaborators? (Resolving merge conflicts when someone is the sole collaborator on a database is far simpler than doing so when you have multiple collaborators, some of whom are online and some of whom are offline, and all of whom are editing different things.)
- How much do you need to be able to do in Airtable while offline? Do you just need a read-only version of the contents of your bases that you can access while offline? Or do you need to have the ability to edit the contents of records while offline? Or do you need to have the ability to change the database schemata while offline? (In order, these are: comparatively simple to implement; difficult to implement; incredibly difficult to implement.)
- For how long do you need to be able to use Airtable offline? For a few minutes, as you drive through a tunnel? (Please don’t Airtable and drive.) For a few hours, as you sit in an airport terminal and refuse to pay for overpriced WiFi? For a few weeks, as you trek through the farthest reaches of frigid Nunavut?
- How tolerant would you be of having to resolve merge conflicts manually? One potential way of alleviating the issues that arise with resolving merge conflicts is to force end users to make decisions on how to solve specific conflicts. This, however, comes with its own set of potential problems (e.g. being stalled by having to resolve a merge conflict when all you want to do is work, your co-workers getting mad that you merged over their data without their permission).
- Would you primarily be using offline mode on desktop or mobile? Anecdotally, it seems like many of the people who want offline mode want it for mobile, but it would be good for us to get some clarification on that front.
How would you want to use Airtable offline?
Mostly read only, but with the ability to add new base entries as needed.
Do you use Airtable alone, or with collaborators?
With collaborators, but they have “Edit only” access
How much do you need to be able to do in Airtable while offline?
No need to change formatting, just want to add new db entries. I would even be happy if attachments weren’t part of offline mode
For how long do you need to be able to use Airtable offline?
Up to a week
How tolerant would you be of having to resolve merge conflicts manually?
As much as you guys need to get it working
Would you primarily be using offline mode on desktop or mobile?
Mobile
Charles_Carlson wrote:
How would you want to use Airtable offline?
I want to use Airtable as a small, easy-to-use database tool for personal and small business use, whether online or offline. That, I thought from your marketing/branding, was the whole point of the app. I don’t want a Filemaker, I want a Bento. So all your worry about all these multiple users potentially making changes at exactly the same time that might mess up the database doesn’t make sense to me; that sounds like an enterprise app problem. I think you need to make up your mind what market you are targeting. As far as how I want to use it offline, I want to be able to make a few changes while I’m flying, either on the OS X app on my MacBook Air or on the IOS app on my iPad, when I’m up in the air with no internet access, and have them automatically sync next time I connect with wifi or cellular. Or maybe I’m out on my boat for the weekend, same thing. Or maybe I’m in a client’s office or the audience at a symposium and I’m having trouble getting the wifi password; there are many different scenarios where I temporarily can’t connect. I’m not looking to do huge amounts of work offline.
Do you use Airtable alone, or with collaborators?
Right now mostly alone, although I anticipate collaborating with a small handful of, say, 1-5 people.
How much do you need to be able to do in Airtable while offline?
Would like it to be fully functional.
How tolerant would you be of having to resolve merge conflicts manually?
That would be time-consuming (time-wasting), so not very tolerant.
Would you primarily be using offline mode on desktop or mobile?
Both.
I’ve been searching around for a goo, easy-to-use simple database program. Started playing around with HanDbase but don’t like the complicated syncing methodology, so thought I’d look for something better. Your product is getting good reviews, and looks good to me, and the syncing problem is non-existent, as long as I’m online. The inability to work offline is a deal-breaker. May have to deal with the hassle of HanDbase syncing, at least I can work offline.
Second in on the requirements with one important exception:
I can do well without the ability to change database structures (including field types, drop-down list contents etc.).
Laurent_Malfair wrote:
Just started to use Airtable yesterday and found this app just fantastic… until I realized it is not usable offline. This is unfortunately a show stopper for me.
I travel a lot around the world for work and wanted to use Airtable as a resource center for many info I need to have on hand all the time.
Unfortunately in my case roaming cost can quickly become a huge hurdle…
I concur. No offline ability = no travel functionality = no airtable use = other apps fill the void :-(…
It is almost a year since this thread started — May I ask where you are with the topic now?
I just created an account for Airtable, because it looks really superb. I don’t like any of the other collaboration tools (Slack included), and this looks to let me work the way I would like to.
As soon as I started to set up the database, I noticed I was working in a browser, and immediately looked for the standalone app mode so I don’t have to always have the browser on and connected to the internet, at which point this topic raised in my mind.
I read the thread, and mostly noticed (besides the technical difficulties, which, as a former programmer, I understand quite well) that the thread is a year old. So - what is the Aug 2017 state, please?
I am working on a fairly complex book + Kickstarter + video library collaborative project, and want to keep track of the parts and allow my colleagues to discuss and contribute as we go. There will be between 3 and 5 key collaborators with access to this db, as I see it. Timeframe is about 6-10 months.
I often find myself working in coffee shops or in locations (Argentina, Colombia, France, Italy, Florida, Washington DC) where there is no internet. But those are the moments when I am working hard on this project. So I need some form of offline work.
I would not need to change the db structure when offline, only add and modify records.
I can collaboratively merge with the others, if we need to. I will be lead author.
I like the suggestion way up high by Howie on Sept 16 about opening the browser, loading the db, turning wifi off, editing away, reconnecting later, and Airtable already handles that! Awesome - I will definitely use that in the next month while I am in the US, at least to try it out.
(ref: "Some Airtable user actions, such as editing a cell or creating/deleting new rows, are performed immediately on the client’s local data representation. Thus, they could theoretically be performed offline. In fact, you can do so today by disconnecting your internet connection without closing the browser tab or the iOS/Android app, making changes, then reconnecting—in absence of any conflicting changes from other clients, your offline edits should seamlessly sync.)
That proposal presupposes that I can load the db before I head to the coffee shop. Which I will try out, for fun and just in case my favorite coffee shop doesn’t have wifi (e.g. Wash DC on the weekends, many coffee shops turn off their internets).
But most of the time I won’t have the luxury to load my db freshly before leaving for the coffee shop. I might get internet every few days (e.g. in Cuba), or I might have to reboot my machine - browser window lost.
Hope that information helps you design your solution.
Back to the original question — where are you with the offline work idea at this point, Aug 2017?
thanks - Alistair Cockburn
+4The ability to access forms and enter data via forms offline would be very useful, particularly for capturing notes or research in the field.
alistair_cockbu wrote:
It is almost a year since this thread started — May I ask where you are with the topic now?
I just created an account for Airtable, because it looks really superb. I don’t like any of the other collaboration tools (Slack included), and this looks to let me work the way I would like to.
As soon as I started to set up the database, I noticed I was working in a browser, and immediately looked for the standalone app mode so I don’t have to always have the browser on and connected to the internet, at which point this topic raised in my mind.
I read the thread, and mostly noticed (besides the technical difficulties, which, as a former programmer, I understand quite well) that the thread is a year old. So - what is the Aug 2017 state, please?
I am working on a fairly complex book + Kickstarter + video library collaborative project, and want to keep track of the parts and allow my colleagues to discuss and contribute as we go. There will be between 3 and 5 key collaborators with access to this db, as I see it. Timeframe is about 6-10 months.
I often find myself working in coffee shops or in locations (Argentina, Colombia, France, Italy, Florida, Washington DC) where there is no internet. But those are the moments when I am working hard on this project. So I need some form of offline work.
I would not need to change the db structure when offline, only add and modify records.
I can collaboratively merge with the others, if we need to. I will be lead author.
I like the suggestion way up high by Howie on Sept 16 about opening the browser, loading the db, turning wifi off, editing away, reconnecting later, and Airtable already handles that! Awesome - I will definitely use that in the next month while I am in the US, at least to try it out.
(ref: "Some Airtable user actions, such as editing a cell or creating/deleting new rows, are performed immediately on the client’s local data representation. Thus, they could theoretically be performed offline. In fact, you can do so today by disconnecting your internet connection without closing the browser tab or the iOS/Android app, making changes, then reconnecting—in absence of any conflicting changes from other clients, your offline edits should seamlessly sync.)
That proposal presupposes that I can load the db before I head to the coffee shop. Which I will try out, for fun and just in case my favorite coffee shop doesn’t have wifi (e.g. Wash DC on the weekends, many coffee shops turn off their internets).
But most of the time I won’t have the luxury to load my db freshly before leaving for the coffee shop. I might get internet every few days (e.g. in Cuba), or I might have to reboot my machine - browser window lost.
Hope that information helps you design your solution.
Back to the original question — where are you with the offline work idea at this point, Aug 2017?
thanks - Alistair Cockburn
i second you post completely !!
Howie wrote:
CEO of Airtable here. Thanks everyone for your feedback so far!
I’ll address joshua_soule’s question, which I interpret as/distill into “can offline read/write access be thought of in the same way as online collaboration, but with exaggerated latency.” The answer is: not entirely.
Some Airtable user actions, such as editing a cell or creating/deleting new rows, are performed immediately on the client’s local data representation (see related concepts of “optimistic UI updating,” “optimistic concurrency,” and “eventual consistency”). Thus, they could theoretically be performed offline. In fact, you can do so today by disconnecting your internet connection without closing the browser tab or the iOS/Android app, making changes, then reconnecting—in absence of any conflicting changes from other clients, your offline edits should seamlessly sync.
The problem is that if changes are made from multiple clients simultaneously—whether by a team collaborator, or yourself from multiple offline devices—these clients increasingly diverge in their local states. In other words, if the Airtable server is the “real world,” each client gets more and more carried away with their imagination and starts to construct their own alternate reality. (Actually, this problem would remain even if you took away the Airtable server and instead made the system peer to peer, at which point you would have to grapple with consensus determination, which becomes increasingly complicated as the data model becomes more sophisticated, i.e. an entire relational database instead of simple numerical values).
Some amount of (or more accurately, “some types of”) divergence can be cleanly merged together: for instance, if you and I edit completely different cell values without making any other changes. In these cases, it’s obvious that our intended changes are completely independent of each other and can be trivially resolved. (For some very simple data structures, you can even construct a highly limited “world” where changes can always be cleanly merged together, but this doesn’t work for more sophisticated applications).
However, this isn’t always true. In some cases, our respective intents come into conflict. Within these cases, it’s sometimes still easy for Airtable to arbitrate our dispute and make a decision on what the outcome should be—in the case of two people overwriting the same cell value, the last edit received by the server wins. Note that for many cell types, Airtable’s behavior is actually a bit more advanced than “last-edit-wins”. For instance, if a multi select cell contains options Albatross and Buzzard, and you remove option Albatross from the cell (thus locally believing the resultant state to be Buzzard) while I simultaneously add option Cockatoo to the multi select cell (thus locally believing the resultant state to be Albatross, Buzzard, Cockatoo), Airtable actually resolves the resultant state to Buzzard and Cockatoo so that both of our intents are preserved, rather than simply clobbering one of our changes with the other .
Sometimes, though, there’s no clear way (not just for Airtable, but on a theoretical level) to resolve the conflicting intents—if one user changes a column, and another simultaneously changes values in the old column, for instance, it’s unclear what the human-desirable outcome is. One of the users’ intents must prevail (at least partially) over the other’s. This is where having 2 seconds of online latency is different from 2 days of latency (i.e. offline mode). With 2 seconds of latency, the most work you’ll lose or need to manually re-perform is 2 seconds. With 2 days of latency, you could potentially lose up to 2 days of work, as your subsequent changes could depend on the first change, which will be rejected. In other words, offline mode prevents you as the user from getting near-realtime feedback that a change being rejected due to another client’s conflicting changes, and instead lets you spiral increasingly into an invalid world of local state which becomes growingly impossible to resolve with the other clients’ world(s).
As far as I know, there are no database systems that gracefully handle all of the above problems. (Airtable is the first end-user relational database that handles fully realtime collaboration). We do believe this is an important feature, but there are necessarily tradeoffs to be made in its design. Your detailed feedback will help guide us to design the right tradeoffs.
Quick 2 cents: offline use would probably switch me from google sheets. Use sheets right now to organize my thoughts. 1 user. Sometimes 2 devices tho. Could also help me replace booking management software at my hotel in ethiopia.
Personally, I’d put up with brutal syncing problems as long as I was informed.
Subways, airplanes, and developing countries.
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