Post random Airtable search results to Slack?

[Kevin_Purdy]

I’ve got a pretty cool thing working, as a result of Airtable’s handy tutorial. In a Slack channel about video games at work, you can type “/gamerec,” followed by either the platform (Switch) or person recommending (Tim), it searches our collaborative Airtable spreadseheet of game recommendations, and then it kicks back 3 of those results to you, inside the Slack channel, all nice and pre-formatted. Yay!

But I want to make it better. I want you to get 3 random results from that search, so that it’s a bit more of a roulette wheel. If Tim has recommended 25 games, you shouldn’t get the same 3 games all the time.

Is there any way to alter the app so that the records returned are random? If not through Airtable’s API, do I have to do that within JavaScript, in the Node.js via Glitch app? Appreciate any help y’all can swing.

[W_Vann_Hall]

There’s currently no intrinsic random[ish] number generator within Airtable. There are ways of getting more-or-less unique, albeit non-random, values out of the platform, values that can be converted, through the application of various arbitrary numeric functions (think ’MOD() by a prime and the like), into something that looks relatively random if you squint hard enough. (Put it this way: I wouldn’t trust it as the seed for an encryption package, but it would probably be reliable enough for a utility that spits out video game recommendations.)

The problem then becomes how to use said kinda random value to determine which three of twenty-five results to return, given Airtable’s lack of array functions. You may find it’s better to return the entire set of, say, Tim-recommended games to your app and then use a pseudorandom generator built in Javascript or similar to determine which of the returned records are actually displayed.