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Airtable is awesome. We have been throwing out a ton of self-built admin forms and CRUD pages by Airtable bases. Now people inside the company can add new fiel

Airtable is awesome. We have been throwing out a ton of self-built admin forms and CRUD pages by Airtable bases. Now people inside the company can add new fields, versioning by default, super simple interface. Largest con: No webhooks. Which makes you pull data every X minutes to find out if a record changed. I would throw them a lot more money (280$/month now) if they just had webhooks as it could replace a TON internal systems/reports. Second con: Ids. I would want them to support client delivered record_ids. Right now airtable has it's own ID field (which can not be set). Therefore if you want syncing to work efficiently you need to store that airtable_id on your side to do REST updates (PATCH). Would be better that airtable record_ids could be provided by the client so I can inject database primary keys and not have to store/query their record_id

tbrock 9y ago
Likewise, I am foaming at the mouth to replace some internal google sheets with air table but as you mention, webhook capability is table stakes to front the effort.
- flukus 9y ago
  I can't believe I'm going to say this, but have you tried sharepoint? It's a horrible product for just about any use case, but ad hoc data entry forms and view for them are where it really shines. It should have more than enough API wise.
  - chenster 9y ago
    I'm not sure if SP is actually in the same market as AT. For SP you still need a team of SP developers, not your average citizen developers.
- agent86 9y ago
  You might want to look into Quick Base.[1] It is actually the little known elder statesman in this space and includes a lot of features Airtable doesn't currently support. Specific to this thread, one of them is Webhooks.[2] And while the product uses an autonumber for keys by default, you can change it and then import/update against your designated key.[3] [1] https://www.quickbase.com https://www.quickbase.com [2] https://help.quickbase.com/user-assistance/default.html#about_webhooks.html https://help.quickbase.com/user-assistance/default.html#abou... [3] https://help.quickbase.com/user-assistance/default.html#setting_the_key_field.html https://help.quickbase.com/user-assistance/default.html#sett...
  - braum 9y ago
    Unless I missed something, their plans start at $25mo (annual billing) with min of 20 users, maybe in same space but not very appetizing to get your feet wet. but i'm sure their pricing is designed with that in mind.
joss82 9y ago
Zapier conveniently replaces web hooks and adds some mapping between fields. Try it out, they have a connector (Zapier calls this an Action)for airtable that works great. Edit: direct link: https://Zapier.com https://Zapier.com
- lachenmayer 9y ago
  When I last used this, it only supported polling (15 minutes at a time iirc).
  - joss82 9y ago
    It now supports real time web hooks. Gosh I sound like a Zapier salesman :)
  - digitalbase 9y ago
    i don't think it works well. Tried it, not all updates come in especially if you're using lookup formulas. If they can do Zapier push then a webhook should not be that hard to pull of either. But the request has been there for a long time (https://community.airtable.com/t/webhooks-for-records/1966 https://community.airtable.com/t/webhooks-for-records/1966) and I just don't think that their architecture is ready for it (yet). Maybe the 50mio will do some good :-)

tbrock 9y ago

Likewise, I am foaming at the mouth to replace some internal google sheets with air table but as you mention, webhook capability is table stakes to front the effort.

flukus 9y ago
I can't believe I'm going to say this, but have you tried sharepoint? It's a horrible product for just about any use case, but ad hoc data entry forms and view for them are where it really shines. It should have more than enough API wise.
- chenster 9y ago
  I'm not sure if SP is actually in the same market as AT. For SP you still need a team of SP developers, not your average citizen developers.
agent86 9y ago
You might want to look into Quick Base.[1] It is actually the little known elder statesman in this space and includes a lot of features Airtable doesn't currently support. Specific to this thread, one of them is Webhooks.[2] And while the product uses an autonumber for keys by default, you can change it and then import/update against your designated key.[3] [1] https://www.quickbase.com https://www.quickbase.com [2] https://help.quickbase.com/user-assistance/default.html#about_webhooks.html https://help.quickbase.com/user-assistance/default.html#abou... [3] https://help.quickbase.com/user-assistance/default.html#setting_the_key_field.html https://help.quickbase.com/user-assistance/default.html#sett...
- braum 9y ago
  Unless I missed something, their plans start at $25mo (annual billing) with min of 20 users, maybe in same space but not very appetizing to get your feet wet. but i'm sure their pricing is designed with that in mind.

joss82 9y ago

Zapier conveniently replaces web hooks and adds some mapping between fields. Try it out, they have a connector (Zapier calls this an Action)for airtable that works great. Edit: direct link: https://Zapier.com https://Zapier.com

lachenmayer 9y ago
When I last used this, it only supported polling (15 minutes at a time iirc).
- joss82 9y ago
  It now supports real time web hooks. Gosh I sound like a Zapier salesman :)
- digitalbase 9y ago
  i don't think it works well. Tried it, not all updates come in especially if you're using lookup formulas. If they can do Zapier push then a webhook should not be that hard to pull of either. But the request has been there for a long time (https://community.airtable.com/t/webhooks-for-records/1966 https://community.airtable.com/t/webhooks-for-records/1966) and I just don't think that their architecture is ready for it (yet). Maybe the 50mio will do some good :-)