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Global Fields for Reuse

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Alex_Murillo
5 - Automation Enthusiast
5 - Automation Enthusiast

As far as I can tell, Airtable does not offer the ability to create global fields (within an Account) that can be reused across all Bases. This is a critical feature if Iโ€™m going to create a Field that would essentially be reused in multiple Tables across multiple Bases.

The primary idea for a Global Field is to create it once, and reuse it multiple times. Additionally, if I add/remove items in the field (e.g. a Select Field type) then all tables using that field would be updated automatically.

I realize I could create a template and then all future Bases could be created from that table, and hence include that field, but this does not cover the field update scenario.

2 Comments
David_Deborin
4 - Data Explorer
4 - Data Explorer

Have you found a workaround solution to this? Iโ€™m having the same problem.

I want to be able to call scripts in other scripts. Essentially, some sort of global function or variable capability would be a HUGE game-changer. This is essential for developers who plan on writing many scripts.

I made a post about this just now - hereโ€™s the link, maybe we push the Airtable team to do something about it:

Avana_Vana
6 - Interface Innovator
6 - Interface Innovator

I believe you could just create a table, and store each field in the table as rows containing columns for the fieldโ€™s name, its type, its options, and its description (if you need it), as JSON, and then in your script you just retrieve each columnโ€™s values, and use JSON.parse() to convert the stringified JSON text stored in the column to JavaScript objects, for instance, the columnโ€™s configuration options, and then you just call table.createFieldAsync(name, type, JSON.parse(options), description) to create the field.

My use case for global variables is more basic. I have several scripts that utilize API calls to the same base URL, and sometimes I need to change the baseURL. As I have more than 3 dozen automations and apps in one base, this can be very tedious and error-prone. It would be so much easier to just be able to define custom global variables, alongside the built-in globals like session, base, etc.

I mean, I could do something similar to what I proposed above, by just making a new table called โ€œGlobal Variablesโ€ containing 2 columns, key and value, and then just get the globals from that table, but this requires adding a whole new asynchronous table lookup call to the scriptโ€”just feels like overkill for such a basic need. Also, my base is open to the public and I donโ€™t want to expose the back-end guts of the automation to the public. I canโ€™t believe they havenโ€™t implemented a way to hide certain tables according to permissions yet.

But yes, global variables would be extremely, extremely useful and I feel itโ€™s just a basic, necessary feature.