Airtable API breaking change with Attachment field - Why no CHANGELOG nor Versionning?

[Ambroise_Dhenai]

We noticed the Airtable API doesn’t return the same data as it used to be when returning an Attachment record.

This is what my base contains:

There is a width column set to 200.00 for the record efrei-v4-logo-efrei-advisor489.

This is the record I get from the Airtable REST API:

{
  id: 'attStvRqkaEsbPNBT',
  width: 500,
  height: 500,
  url: null, // Hidden
  filename: 'XXX (3).png',
  size: 42687,
  type: 'image/png',
  thumbnails: null // Abbregated for clarity 
}

Before, this API was not returning the width and height properties (at least, it wasn’t returning those with our way of building our query). This seems to be something new, which in turn broke our products because it overrode our own width and height properties (we were looping on all of the Attachment record properties to dynamically copy those properties into an aggregated record which contains a mix of the Attachment record and the Asset record).

This kind of small changes should be documented, there is no changelog whatsoever, nor any kind of versioning. This is something that has always bothered us, as any change made to the API will be applied to all customers at once and there is no way to even know what’s gonna change. I don’t even now since when this issue occurs, it’s not really reassuring.

[Ambroise_Dhenai]

Also, note that I like the change, the original width/height properties were definitely missing there and it was complicated/unreliable to figure them out (had to dig into the thumbnails property). So, it’s a good change.

It simply lacks good communication/transparency, and probably a way to enable such new feature, maybe by providing a HTTP header as a flag, to avoid breaking existing apps.