Re: Dynamic Dropdown #indirect #substitute
The base is client’s property so can’t share it without explicit consent. This should be enough to get you going, though, just consider the following way of populating fields:
the end result looks the same like just writing [0-9] into a single-line field, (times however many records you might have), right?
But here’s the real reason we’re doing it this way: modular regex invocations:
I found this approach to result in significantly easier debugging tasks and maintenance (this is part of a natural language processing pipeline with a data-to-text component, meaning things real crazy, real fast, and I need to be able to make sense of hundreds of fields at a glance) than relying on 50-line formulas, regardless of whether you’re inputting them directly or importing from an IDE.
The field names aren’t the most revealing in this example, but this particular setup started as an attempt to write (and teach) regex without having to fiddle with the claustrophobic formula field but while still getting real-time results.
The nested logic also works with both short and long text fields, as well as choice-based fields and links (it just outputs their visible string values to plaintext). The interpolation is pretty limited, however, and trying to drill deep into the concept will probably result in you slamming headfirst into a wall of technical debt.
For heavy - or rather: heavier - interpolation with acceptable performance (assuming that is what you’re really after), look no further than the scripting block/app itself. All you really need to internalize to get started is that:
let test = '## hello, airtable' + " and $goodbye"
let aloha = `${test}`
output.markdown(aloha)
… would output an h2-level subheader like this:
hello, airtable and $goodbye
Grave accents/backticks `` and the ${} template literal form that utilizes them are the key to making it work in this context. Because everything between the curly brackets gets evaluated on the condition that the result is returned as a string. Scaffolding prototypes this way is much quicker than fiddling with a bajillion dynamic fields but good luck debugging extra whitespaces in the scripting block at 5am, or so I hear.
