AMA Custom Blocks Contest Edition #1 - Getting Started with the Airtable Product Team (Live on Wednesday 6/10)

[Michelle_Valent]

Do you have an idea for the Custom Blocks contest but don’t know where to start or which examples are most relevant to your idea? We’re hosting a live Ask Me Anything (AMA) session in this thread on Wednesday (6/10) at 11am PT.

Michelle Valentine and Kasra Kyanzadeh from our product team will be available to answer any questions about getting started and turning your ideas into reality.

The top 3 upvoted questions will win a $40 Amazon gift card. You can even start posting your questions now, and we’ll be answering questions live from 11am - 11:30am PT on Wednesday. See you there!

[Jeremy_Oglesby]

Thank you, @Kasra. The picture is becoming a little more clear to me how $ block ... --remote handles this, and the questions in my head are kind of morphing as my understanding of it changes.

Kasra:

We’re exploring ways to make this more seamless in the future.

In particular, are you exploring ways to make keeping Custom Blocks updated a more seamless process for both creators and consumers of those blocks?

[Ashwin_Kumar]

Technical question: do blocks allow for real-time updating of records within Airtable? Meaning, within my block, can I hit the Airtable API for the base that the block is installed in? I’m assuming yes since it’s just React within the block, but would I need the base user to put in their Airtable API token in the onboarding process within the block?

For a simple example if I wanted to get weather data every 10 minutes from an API and update a record within the base (and use the Block for another purpose like displaying the weather trends in near-real time), do you see any hiccups there? I’m not sure about the API rate limits.

I haven’t built on the Airtable API before so apologies if these questions are easily answered elsewhere.

[kuovonne]

I’m having some trouble getting some of the examples to install. Where do you suggest going for troubleshooting info on getting started? It can be hard to tell if my issue is an npm issue, a node issue, a react issue, or what. I haven’t worked in react before.

[Kasra]

Thank you, I’m happy to hear it’s been a pleasant experience so far :raised_hands:

Can you give an overview of how setPathsAsync function works behind the scene and how much more performant it is for nested objects?

Both setAsync and setPathsAsync let you update nested values by passing in a path for the key. This is important if you want to avoid clobbering the other parts of the object if multiple users are writing to different parts of that object.

setPathsAsync is useful if you want to update multiple keys/paths in different parts of the tree in one shot. This is more performant than calling setAsync a bunch of times in rapid succession since setPathsAsync will end up making a single network call.

one of the other thing my Blocks app does is aggregating _changeCount values across records. I noticed that it doesn’t actually increment by 1 as it should. What’s happening here?

Any methods or variables that begin with an underscore (_) are private SDK internals and aren’t documented, so you shouldn’t rely on them in your code since their behavior may change at any point.

Is there a way to get data about specific record history?

There isn’t an API for getting this information at the moment, but I’ll note your +1 for it! Out of curiosity, what are you hoping to build with it?

[Jeremy_Oglesby]

Ashwin_Kumar:

do blocks allow for real-time updating of records within Airtable?

@Ashwin_Kumar – yes; Custom Blocks have a direct API with the base they are installed in; no need to use the REST API from within the Custom Block (unless you are wanting to interact with a completely separate base). You can simply call table.updateRecordAsync() to make updates to records within the base.

[Michelle_Valent]

Hi @kuovonne!

We don’t have details to share on a developer plan yet, but rest assured that our intention is to make Airtable even more accessible and affordable for developers. We will continue to support developers to build blocks for free (e.g. connect blocks-cli etc.) and are looking to make the full custom blocks functionality - that pro users have - available to developers on a special developer plan. More exciting things to come!

[Kasra]

Jeremy_Oglesby:

Are you exploring ways to make keeping Custom Blocks updated a more seamless process for both creators and consumers of those blocks?

Yep, that’s part of it!

[Michelle_Valent]

Hi @Harshit_Juneja

That’s wonderful to hear :tada: . And thank you for helping us on this journey as well by offering solutions to the community. Makes a world of difference.

If you want to have the same API key across all users, you can store the code directly in the source code of the block.

If you want the user to bring their own API key (like we do for the Twilio Send SMS block), you can store the user’s API key in globalConfig, which is a key-value store that’s scoped to that block installation.

Note that in either case, the credentials will be visible to all users of the block, since the API requests are made client-side.

[kuovonne]

With all the tools available, what types of people do you consider to be developers?

• someone who writes a custom block?
• someone who writes a script for scripting block?
• someone who uses the Standard API?
• someone who has an API key and puts it in a 3rd party app but might not write any code directly?
• someone with creator permissions on a base?

[Kasra]

kuovonne:

I’m having some trouble getting some of the examples to install. Where do you suggest going for troubleshooting info on getting started? It can be hard to tell if my issue is an npm issue, a node issue, a react issue, or what.

Hi! I think the best place is to start a thread in this forum (https://community.airtable.com/c/developers/custom-blocks-beta/54). Our team regularly checks new topics, and in some cases there might be someone else who’s already run into the same issue.