More efficient way to query records?

[Bruce_Halliburt]

Is there a way to retrieve specific records without iterating through all the results of a table using
table.selectRecordsAsync() or view.selectRecordsAsync()? Something like SELECT / WHERE queries in SQL? Or in AirTable terms, a Filter? This would be far more efficient than having to iterate through returned records checking for the records I’m interested in…

[JonathanBowen]

I did a quick write up of Javascript filter here:

Airscript – 23 Jun 20

Using ‘filter’

Getting the data you want using the filter method

[Lisa_Hagan]

This appears to only work on the first field in a table which is the index. This doesn’t work for other fields in the table?

[JonathanBowen]

Hi @Lisa_Hagan - yes the script is specifically pointing to the email field in my example:

let filteredRecords = query.records.filter(person => {
    return person.getCellValue('Email').includes(searchTerm)
})

But this could be changed to match against any field in the table

[Lisa_Hagan]

HI @JonathanBowen, any field could be searched on but the return value will always be for the first field.

[JonathanBowen]

H @Lisa_Hagan - what you get back is an array of the filtered records. By default this contains the id and the name (the Airtable record ID and the primary field value:

But you can loop through this array and access any of the fields attached to each record. So if I have this:

Then I can access the first name like this:

for (let person of filteredRecords) {
    console.log(person.getCellValue('First Name'))
}

So, the full script is:

let table = base.getTable('People');
let query = await table.selectRecordsAsync();

let searchTerm = await input.textAsync('Enter your search term');

let filteredRecords = query.records.filter(person => {
    return person.getCellValue('Email').includes(searchTerm)
})

console.log(filteredRecords);

for (let person of filteredRecords) {
    console.log(person.getCellValue('First Name'))
}

[JonathanBowen]

JonathanBowen:

for (let person of filteredRecords) {
    console.log(person.getCellValue('First Name'))
}

Or more generally:

for (let person of filteredRecords) {
    console.log(person.getCellValue('YOUR FIELD NAME'))
}

[Lisa_Hagan]

JonathanBowen:

let table = base.getTable('People');
let query = await table.selectRecordsAsync();

let searchTerm = await input.textAsync('Enter your search term');

let filteredRecords = query.records.filter(person => {
    return person.getCellValue('Email').includes(searchTerm)
})

console.log(filteredRecords);

for (let person of filteredRecords) {
    console.log(person.getCellValue('First Name'))
}

Thank you Jonathan. This makes sense.