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Custom Reporting & Dashboard Tools

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BenInDallas
7 - App Architect
7 - App Architect

I’ve been using Airtable for a while now on a limited basis. I really want to deploy to my entire company as a project management tool (one base with tables for Clients, Departments, Projects, Tasks, Notes, Events, etc), but two key features are missing for me:

A Dashboard/Landing Page- What I’d like is a kind of “me view” that any user can use as a home page for the base… it would automatically display (in some simple grid/block form) everything related to a given collaborator… every client, project task, message, etc, that they are associated with… with clickable links to the actual record in Airtable. This is far more than a custom Airtable “View”, because it involves data from more than one table.

A Report Builder - Basically, we need to be able to (at a moment’s notice) generate a printable project status report from a given Airtable view (a grid/spreadsheet-style view of dozens of projects, ideally with page headers/footers, numbered rows, labeled columns, and all the other features you’d see on a typical Excel spreadsheet when printed). The current “print view” feature doesn’t offer enough control, and the new Page Designer is a great tool, but is not suited for printing multiple records on a page.

My best guess is that each of these items could be accomplished with a web page that pulls data from the Airtable API.

I’m not a programmer, but I’m somewhat familiar with the API and its ability to generate JSON objects, and I’ve browsed third-party tools like Airpress. I’m just curious if other users have built anything along these lines for their own base(s) that would serve as a good model or case study for mine, or whether I’m venturing into uncharted waters?

3 Replies 3
Andrew_Johnson1
8 - Airtable Astronomer
8 - Airtable Astronomer

Hi Ben,
So what you are stating is definitely and achievable task…
I for one frequently use Airtable for many of my projects to store the backend data…
It allows a less experienced administrator to manage the data on the database…

But for the “users” of the web application I generally use Airtable’s APIs to fetch data to display the same…
The great thing about their API’s is that its completely REST based so you can access the service via virtually any language that supports HTTP calls…

Going back to your question as to “whether I’m venturing into uncharted waters”…I would say definitely NO…and give it a go…

Initially to get into the groove of things I would suggest that develop a small page to fetch all the data from a table on Airtable and display it on the HTML page…after that you could add your customization in a step by step manner…

BenInDallas
7 - App Architect
7 - App Architect

Thanks Andrew. Do you have any live examples you can share?

Mariane_Marketi
6 - Interface Innovator
6 - Interface Innovator

Hey Ben,

I agree we need better reporting and dashboards available.

As a temporary solution I use Interfaces, csv exports & the go full page extension on Chrome.

 

Go full page allows me to screenshot the entire page as a pdf - it's manual, but somewhat a solution until Airtable offers a reporting tool.

 

GoFullPage