Admittedly, an edge case, but in working with the Airpress WordPress-to-Airtable API and plugin, I ran into problems when attempting to display only the first image from an attachment field. After hours spent stepping my way through the plugin, I finally discovered I’d been debugging the wrong module entirely. Discouraged, I took a break, fed the cat, got another cup of coffee – and then wondered if I might not be able to goose Airtable into giving me the data directly.
Five minutes later, I had it.
The example assumes an Attachment field named ‘images’, but should work with attachments of any type.
To extract the URL
MID(images,FIND("(",images)+1,(FIND(")",images)-1)-(FIND("(",images)))
To extract the file name
LEFT(images,FIND(" ",images)-1)
This works because Airtable will cast an Attachment field to a comma-delimited string of values when it is acted upon by a text function. Each attachment value consists of two parts, separated by a space: the original file name (sans path) and the Airtable URL, enclosed in parentheses – as so:
FileName1 (URL1),FileName2 (URL2),[...],FileNameX] (URL[x])
Again, probably not of interest for most Airtable users – but if I’d thought about it earlier, I could have saved myself a day’s effort.
