Hey everyone,
We’ve got some exciting news about a long-awaited change to app cloning in Airtable!
Who does this affect? This change is for all users of Airtable across all our plan types.
What’s Changing? Currently, when you clone an app (e.g. using “Duplicate base” or “Take snapshot”), all the underlying object IDs (like table IDs and field IDs) are replaced with new ones in the cloned version. With this update, those IDs will now stay the same in the cloned app. The only thing that will change is the top-level app ID.
Why This Matters: This update will make things a lot smoother, especially for users who’ve had to deal with workarounds due to different object IDs when restoring snapshots.
How to review your set up: For most users, this shouldn’t require you to make any changes to your workflow. If you’ve built integrations or automations that assume object IDs are globally unique, you’ll want to review your set up to make sure that it can adapt to this new behavior of IDs being preserved in cloned apps.
Note, the top level app ID will still be globally unique, but these underlying IDs (e.g. table IDs, record IDs, view IDs, etc) can no longer be assumed to be globally unique. The underlying object IDs will be unique within the scope of the app ID, and thus pairing an underlying object ID with the top-level app ID will be globally unique.
We are planning to roll this out around late November. As always, if you have any questions or need help, feel free to ask here or contact our support team.
Thanks for being part of the Airtable community!
Best,
Rich from Airtable
