I found a half-way solution that will help in some use-cases while waiting for the metadata API.
Visit https://airtable.com/api and select a base. Then open your browsers console (Developer Tools) and run the following (I tried simply running JSON.stringify(window.application), however there are circular references so I had to manually reconstruct the properties I wanted).
var myapp = {
id:window.application.id,
name:window.application.name,
tables:[]
};
for (let table of window.application.tables){
var mytable = {
id:table.id,
isEmpty:table.isEmpty,
name:table.name,
nameForUrl:table.nameForUrl,
primaryColumnName:table.primaryColumnName,
columns:[]
};
for (let column of table.columns){
var mycolumn = {
id:column.id,
name:column.name,
type:column.type,
typeOptions:column.typeOptions
};
mytable.columns.push(mycolumn);
}
myapp.tables.push(mytable);
}
jQuery('link[rel=stylesheet]').remove();
jQuery("body").html(JSON.stringify(myapp));
console.log(myapp);
