View Shares: How to create LOTS of them

[Robert_Tolmach]

We need to create hundreds (soon, thousands) of external users to be able to see transactions that pertain to their own accounts–but not any other transactions.

RI read about View Shares, but it looks like we would have to define them one at a time, and that for each one, we would have to manually set which columns to hide and which rows to filter. Doing that a thousand times does not sound like fun.

Saw a post to the forum, where someone asked about giving external users URLs with the filter built in as a parameter, but the reply was it did not work.

Each of our three types of external users should see certain fields.
Each external user should only see transactions where Field X = viewer ID.

Is there a way to create all those links or passwords in bulk? Cannot do them one at a time.

Thanks!

[Bill_French]

Hi Robert,

Robert_Tolmach:

it looks like we would have to define them one at a time

Unfortunately, I believe this is correct. Until such time as the Airtable API is extended to support the creation of data assets such as bases, tables, and views, the scale you hope to achieve is not likely possible.

Robert_Tolmach:

be able to see transactions that pertain to their own accounts–but not any other transactions.

In my opinion, even if you could use the API to instantiate thousands of views, it would not be the right approach. Ideally, the view [object] should be a template instantiated (n…) times. Creating the same view for 1000 user contexts is not architecturally sound. You really want to create views by reference, not by value.

Imagine (down the road) you want to enhance or update 1,000 views. Unless your solution is based on a single rendering object, you are faced with 1,000 updates.

I was asked to take over a project at KFC a few years back. The developer that started the project a year earlier had created the first 2200 dashboards for their 17,500 store locations globally. The VP of Engineering asked me how fast I could complete the remaining 15,300 dashboards. I said - a week.

KFC needed exactly 2199 fewer dashboards than they had already created. You actually need only one view and quite possibly Airtable is the wrong way to deliver this functionality. But much more will need to be discussed to know if my comments are helpful.

[JonathanBowen]

@Robert_Tolmach - agree with @Bill.French on this. What this scenario is crying out for is some sort of web app that allows the user to reference their data using URL parameters (less security, but reasonably safe depending upon your data set) or some kind of account/login system where a record is tied to, for example, an email address (in your base) and logging into the web app with this email shows the records for the same.

The Airtable data could be exposed to the web app by using the AT API.

JB

[Bill_French]

JonathanBowen:

… some kind of account/login system where a record is tied to, for example, an email address (in your base) and logging into the web app with this email shows the records for the same.

Agree. Airborne does exactly this using the Firebase security model.

From an implementation perspective, Firebase hosting (not the cheapest) but certainly ideal for mobile/laptop/desktop is dang near perfect if you want to expose any data in a web context via the Airtable API.