There’s two ways to do this, depending on how many records you’re really expecting.
- Fetch related records one at a time
- Build a filterByFormula parameter that uses OR() to get multiple records.
Option 1 would be extremely inefficient. And with option 2 you can request multiple records per call—either all the records associated with one related record, or (as I do in this example) all the records associated with an array of related records.
So, as you’re looping through the records from a table (we’ll call it “People”), you should build an array of the IDs you need to fetch from the related table (we’ll call it “Orders”). For the purposes of this example, I’m going to assume the each record from table People has only several related records in Orders (as opposed to hundreds).
The following code should provide a rough idea of how to do what you’re trying to do with only two requests to the Airtable API. One to fetch all the people, and one to fetch all the orders.
There are two functions below that I don’t define—they’ll need to reference whatever code you use to actually connect to airtable and retreive records.
getSomeRecordsFromAirtable()
getSomeFilteredRecordsFromAirtable()
<?php
$people = getSomeRecordsFromAirtable();
$order_ids = array();
foreach($people as $record){
$order_ids = array_merge($order_ids,$record["fields"]["Orders"]);
}
$orders_index = getOrdersByID($order_ids);
foreach($people as $record){
$n = $record["fields"];
echo $n["Name"];
echo "<ul>";
foreach($n["Orders"] as $order_id){
echo "<li>".$orders_index[$order_id]["fields"]["Column from Orders Table"]."</li>";
}
echo "</ul>";
}
function getOrdersByID($order_ids){
$filterByFormula = "OR(RECORD_ID() = '".implode("', RECORD_ID() = '", $order_ids)."')";
$orders = getSomeFilteredRecordsFromAirtable("Orders",$filterByFormula);
$orders_indexed_by_id = array();
foreach($orders as $record){
$id = $record["id"];
$orders_indexed_by_id[$id] = $record;
}
return $orders_indexed_by_id;
}
?>
Let me know how it goes!
