I really hope that Airtable fixes this problem ASAP, because otherwise, this Maps Block will be of absolutely no use to my clients who have thousands of records in their system. Seems like it would only be useful for people with a small handful of records in their system.
Yep - must be fixed - this is why we abandoned the idea of using Airtable maps for our project. This chart represents just 10 minutes of public transit locations reporting passenger flow. There aren’t many route stop locations, but there is a lot of activity and that’s when we noticed this overheating of the API calls.
Original poster here again, with an update.
TLDR my problem appears to be solved. To summarize:
- When I posted this, I was seeing my geocoding go haywire like this (33,000 geocoding requests!):
I tore down all existing Map Blocks in my project
I re-created, pointing the Map Blocks to purely static Single line text columns (created with a one-off copy&paste). That immediately nipped the problem in the bud, as expected:
I then resumed using Formula columns, being careful to ensure that no two Map Blocks were referencing the same cache column, but with different location columns. Ultimately in my case I think that was the root of the pathological geocoding I was seeing, as suggested above (and maybe that condition might make for a good warning message in the product? cc @Kasra).
API usage seems normal again. Note a small number of requests, corresponding to actually changed data:
I am cautiously saying that a Map based on a concatenated Formula column is now working as expected and will report back if that’s not true.
The only weird thing now, is that I unpredictably get this dialog once in a while in my Map Block. I worry that this is alarming/discouraging to my users and keeps them from using the maps. I can’t figure out the reason for this, no settings have changed in the meantime afaik:
Original poster here again, with an update.
TLDR my problem appears to be solved. To summarize:
- When I posted this, I was seeing my geocoding go haywire like this (33,000 geocoding requests!):
I tore down all existing Map Blocks in my project
I re-created, pointing the Map Blocks to purely static Single line text columns (created with a one-off copy&paste). That immediately nipped the problem in the bud, as expected:
I then resumed using Formula columns, being careful to ensure that no two Map Blocks were referencing the same cache column, but with different location columns. Ultimately in my case I think that was the root of the pathological geocoding I was seeing, as suggested above (and maybe that condition might make for a good warning message in the product? cc @Kasra).
API usage seems normal again. Note a small number of requests, corresponding to actually changed data:
I am cautiously saying that a Map based on a concatenated Formula column is now working as expected and will report back if that’s not true.
The only weird thing now, is that I unpredictably get this dialog once in a while in my Map Block. I worry that this is alarming/discouraging to my users and keeps them from using the maps. I can’t figure out the reason for this, no settings have changed in the meantime afaik:
Not sure about that warning message! That’s strange.
That’s great to hear that your situation is temporarily working. Not sure if it’s going to stay permanently working, though. I say that because my system is setup 100% identically to yours, and I temporarily didn’t see any problems at first — and then all the same problems started happening to me shortly thereafter.
I reached out to support@airtable.com, and they said that they would investigate this issue.
If your solution breaks again, our only option for now will be to use external automations & websites to map our data. Kind of a bummer.
