Show and Tell

Why these scripts In the scripting block, in order to get cell values from the records returned by the selectRecordsAsync() method, a script must use the getCellValue() method. These two helper functions are designed to make future access to cell values more accessible to other parts of a script by turning cell values into object properties. Record values as object properties Example usage: let records = await getRecordsAsList(table, fieldNames); recordId = records[index].id; recordName = records[index].name; fieldValue = records[index].fields[fieldName]; Here’s the code: gist.github.com

Hi everyone :wave: We’re excited to release a new tool for Airtable: Search Webpage for Airtable Records! This tool is particularly useful if you have clients/students/employees and you only want them to be able to see the records that they are associated with, and none of the other records in your base. Example Use Cases Order status lookup Ticket tracking Search student’s grades And much more! Some of the Features: Generates a unique URL that you can share with anyone. Supports searching with one or multiple fields. Hide any fields you do not want to show in the results.

I love sharing tips to help others learn more about Airtable, and the idea for this YouTube channel has been brewing in my mind for a while now. Even though I’m scrambling to prepare for our cross-country move in a few weeks, I wanted to make this quick tease about the channel: Subscribe now so that you’ll be ready when the “real” stuff starts going up, which will probably be some time in December if things go according to plan.

This is not a show; rather mostly a tell. It’s my experience (which is extremely limited given that the Script Block feature is still a newborn) that for every hour spent developing a block, plan on an equal or greater time implementing the completed block into your solution. There are many reasons this is the case including but not limited to these points: Hard-coded table and/or field references Success-biased data that create testing blind-spots Lack of anticipation concerning the block used in “the wild” Inadequate testing cycles at scale I’m often asked - Hey Bill, can you whip me up a script to do that? My problem is so simple, I’ll bet it will take you a few minutes to bang this out! Um, sure? I guess? On second thought … many of us who may be easily coaxed into the feeling that script blocks are simple littl

Hi all, just thought I’d share an insight I had about working with lists. Recently, I had a project where we needed to take an email address from a customer-submitted form and check whether the email is from a list of known domains. I could have used an OR() statement, but that would have created a very lengthy formula, because I had to first separate out the domain from the rest of the email, using this formula: LOWER(MID(TRIM({Email}),FIND("@",TRIM({Email}))+1,999)) Thus, if I have to compare that to 5 different domains using an OR() statement, I’d have to repeat that formula snippet 5 times, and that’s not very DRY, is it? What I realized was that instead, I could use a SWITCH() statement. Since a SWITCH() statement allows you to optionally include a final parameter in case none of the cases listed matches the initi

Many future clients often ask me: Should I automate this process? And if so, where do I start? This is not uncommon thinking; we’re over-saturated with tasks and our resources are stretched beyond reason. Of course, the answer is always - yes - automated it all if possible. And while we like the sound of this, the more difficult question to answer is the cost-benefit of automation. Until you can look at a task (or ideally, a collection of dependent tasks) and put a value of making it entirely disappear from your involvement, automation should not be undertaken. My advice is to segment processes with a diagram and then apply some basic metrics concerning effort. Once you see the bigger picture and the effort each step in your processes require, then you can ask if it makes sense to automate that segment of your process. Some processes (when diagrammed) become obvious candidates for automation, but

This is an example to take advantage of Airtable’s new scripting block for taking a selection of records and formatting links to send in an email to a fellow collaborator. The sample base is located on Universe: Airtable

Sometimes you want to visualize some metrics. For example, I may want to see the different delivery metrics of email campaigns by different segments across many years. I can do this nicely with blocks if each campaign is delivered to only one segment. However, if I’ve got an email that hits two (or more birds) with one stone…aka one email delivered to multiple segments, this is where my chart gets wonky. I can’t break out the multiple segments while still looking at my chart over time. (Note: You can do this in a pivot table block, but charts are just way more impactful sometimes.) To get a better chart that does break these segments out, I’ll need a Summary Table, which is a nice way of saying I’ll need a junction table to break out this

Using this script with the Content Calendar Template, you will be able to do some common tasks with managing your content calendar. This script will enhance the Content Calendar Base by providing 2 common tasks: Create new Content - this easier approach to creating new content makes it quick to get content added to your table Publish Content - once you have created content, you want to publish it quickly to multiple platforms. This makes it easy to track which platforms you are publishing it to (Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook) and automatically links it back to the primary content. NOTE: This does not actually publish to Social media platforms, it simply tracks where you have published the content to and how. No changes are required to be made, simply run script and select one of the two options. TEMPLATE TO INSTALL:

Something very often requested is the ability to extract the meta information of a base/table to be used for external use. Now, with the new scripting block, that information can be extracted and shared outside. Simply copy this code into a scripting block and run it. If you wish to publish to a 3rd party endpoint, simply modify the codebase. Full documentation provided inside the code. gist.github.com https://gist.github.com/on2air/ab32b4bb59d02d490be37e28d45daf92 On2Air: Meta Extraction Script /***** * Title: Post Meta Data * License: MIT * Author: Openside (Team behind On2Air

Hi Everyone. Beenform is a simple form backend product that enables you to setup working web forms that works with Airtable in just a couple minutes. With Beenform, you can hook up your static HTML form, with an endpoint that captures form submissions and creates an Airtable record. In addition to collecting submissions, you can enable User Authentication in beenform so that any form submission from your users, an automated email with their unique individual link will be sent to them, which they can always use to update only their individual records. All these changes are made in your Airtable base. Every Beenform form also includes automatic spam filtering, Google recaptcha support etc. We are still currently in beta, so it’s completely free. Let me know what you think. You can check it out here https://beenform.co . Thanks all :slight

Hello everyone. We use Airtable for various things at Unly, and we have always been concerned by the inability to create scheduled backups that really fit our needs. Despite the fact Airtable has its own backups/restore feature, it didn’t fit our needs. And, because Airtable holds lots of business-sensitive data, it was a very big risk for us not to be in control of the backup&restore process. So, we built a tool that is designed to perform scheduled backups automatically, and deal with backups lifecycle (auto-removal, etc.). Today, we’re releasing this proprietary software as OSS under MIT license. GitHub

I always wince when I see broad and sweeping claims that a tool can perform workflows. This is especially problematic in platforms that are not designed with an integrated state machine. Lacking this, we are all left to manage the state of any workflow process on our own. Many of you are nodding. Here’s a design I put together recently that provides a way for vendors to receive email notifications of opportunities to bid on projects and a complete workflow process that captures their bids. The red lines indicate the flow of the Quote Request Process which is a lights-out factory process - it just happens automatically as new records emerge in the Quote Request table. The green lines indicate the flow of the Request Response Process which is kicked off by a vendor respond

Hi! Would like to ask about the which options do you have for international customers (Non-US residents) because I’d like to subscribe but there’s no option for Paypal for instance. Thanks.

Airtable Now Supports Webhooks! This has been an open item in the Airtable support community for a few years, see “Webhooks for Records” and here, & here, and we are excited to offer a free solution to the community. Here is the high level solution: Based on the transitive property (A=B and B=C, then A=C), Airtable supports Slack Notifications, and Slack supports webhooks, so Airtable supports webhooks! You just have to know how to set it up correctly. With a simple integration via Pipedream into Slack, all Airtable users can now get near real time

Are you an avid reader?! I just posted a Book Tracker Database on Airtable Universe! Airtable

tl;dr version: A frequent query and/or complaint concerns users who wish to access data from a record for use in a calculation performed in a different record from the same table. Often this takes the form of a user asking ‘how to retrieve a value based on row number’; other times the user wishes to perform a calculation that assumes knowledge of the previous record — for instance, maintaining a running balance. A recently published base contains four approaches to this problem, three involving sequential records offset by varying numbers of days, and a fourth allowing retrieval of arbitrary data from the previous and previous-but-one record. Lately, I’ve been playing around with cross-record or multi-record calculations — that is, the ability to retrieve a value from a prior record for use with calculations in the current record. This is a recurring issue for users who conflate Airta

I couldn’t find a template that was already set up with an invoice and the option to add payments, see previous orders, etc. So I ended up making one! I’m sure there are issues with it, but it’s a good starting point. I hope you find it useful! Airtable

I was thinking about how to add some functionality to a base and, for the base user, how they would trigger this. In most web apps functionality will be invoked by the click of a button - save edits, delete a record and so on - but this button functionality isn’t available in Airtable. But…Zapier provides a webhook component that can be invoked to kick off a Zap. I frequently use Zaps in my bases and they are mostly triggered by the standard Airtable triggers - new record or new record in a view. One downside to this, which this demo gets around, is that a record can only be triggered once (or once as a new record and once in a given view). By using webhooks to trigger the functionality, it can be executed an arbitrary number of times for any record. My demo for this is based on translating content from one language to another. I have some text in English and I want to translate each record of content into German:

Hi All! Last weekend I was involved in putting on the Consciousness Hacking Holiday Party. We were using [MUSE Headbands][(https://choosemuse.com/) for a meditation competition. The headbands measure brain activity and we competed for the highest scores of relaxation and focus. With over 60 competitors we used Airtable to manage the entire competition. Each volunteer recorded the score of the competitor and took a picture of them. All the results were sent to the big screen in a “Keep sorted” Gallery view with the winners at the top and if their score was over 500, colored Green.

I’ve just added a new post to my blog Online Database Expert which shows how to use Integromat to create Barcodes from Airtable records and then post the resulting barcode (or QR Code) image back into the Airtable record. You can see all of the posts relevant to Airtable (including the Bar-code one) here: Database Expert Blog | Online Database Expert Visit our Blog where we review database and other cloud / online platforms and where you can comment.

…but I will. :grinning: I just got a new Badge for viewing posts for 365 consecutive days! Pretty impressive, I’d say. It seems that I am the only one, at this time. I thought I would share this. Mary K

I just wanted to show (perhaps showoff :winking_face: ) one of our latest projects with Airtable. Using multiple Airtable tables our marketing client manages their projects, clients and incoming reports. They require their contractors to upload reports which we are using an AT form (soon to be custom form as client needs extra requirements) to input the data. Each of the customers are using a generated token based on the AT record ID which is part of their link to access the site ie. mysite.com/wo55eiruWERsdhf234 as security isn’t a primary objective they just don’t want “browsers” being able to have public access. These links can be sent out using the Airtable email block, these links are easily regenerated in AT and deactivated using a checkbox as well. Each client gets their unique link

I was recently lamenting about the lack of a scripting model in Airtable in this discussion concerning actionable buttons and Jonathan Bowen called my attention to a pretty clever way to utilize multiple Zapier components to call out via URLs in fields and update the record (or records) in the table. I wasn’t familiar with this approach and it opened my eyes to a number of possibilities for serverless integration processes. It reminded me of a similar approach that I am intimately familiar with that stems from my deep desire to script processes inside Airtable, even going so far as to create a rudimentary web service that would allow me to easily create script steps in long text fields and then execute those steps against fields via the API using a little thing I call Airdrop which I use perva

This loops through all the records from a view or search and performs the following steps for each record. It is intended to run after something else triggers it. It returns all fields of the records as well (as long as you include them in your query), so that you can use them as ingredients in the following steps of the zap without having to do a separate lookup. T Here is the code where you can copy and paste it. var settings = { 'method': 'GET', 'headers': { "Authorization": "Bearer <API KEY HERE>", }, }; fetch('http://api.airtable.com/v0/APP_NAME_HERE/TABLE_HERE/?QUERYS_GO_HERE', settings) .then(function(res) { return res.text(); }) .then(function(body) { // body is the raw return from the API call body.toString(); console.log(); var jsonData = JSON.parse(body); var length = jsonData.length; var output =