5 ms·

I'm the founder of a startup (www.getsubsystem.com) that builds solutions on top of Airtable, so I'm familiar with their systems. While it's true that their RES

I'm the founder of a startup (www.getsubsystem.com) that builds solutions on top of Airtable, so I'm familiar with their systems. While it's true that their REST API has some sharp-edges, particularly around linked fields (columns), rate-limiting, and filtering records, I think it’s mostly solid and user-friendly. Getting records from a table is as straightforward as making an API call to: `/{baseId}/{tableId}`. For getting the actual ids, there's a metadata API. The docs are also quite comprehensive. I’m curious as to where you have run into issues?

tgtweak 3y ago
As a user of airtable and not a developer of an airtable app/plugin, the api calls are burdensome (dereferencing lookup fields, data types) and if you want to do any serious work on large bases, you hit rate limits/call limits very quickly. They make it trivial to import/push data in but accessing it or pulling it out looks like an intentionally hindered dark design pattern (like egress on aws). I have resorted to writing extension scripts in their godforsaken nonstandard javascript framework to access and aggregate data before pushing it out. Accessing google sheets programmatically is a walk in the park, comparatively.