Populating linked records

[ezeikel]

I have been using Airtable as the database to work with a Node/Express API for about a year and when fetching data from a table, any linked records just return as IDs.

I ended up creating a populate() function which loops through these linked IDs and does another fetch to Airtable to grab those linked records and merge it back into the original object.

As you can imagine this can result in some really slow response times based on how many records are being returned and how many linked IDs those record have.

Would love to know if there is an easier/more performant way to do this?