@naturalcycles/airtable-lib
v3.0.1
Published
High-level API and CLI for Airtable
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@naturalcycles/airtable-lib
High-level API and CLI for Airtable.
Features
- Allows high level API access to Airtable contents
- Allows to download Airtable data to json (backup), upload it back with all links and order preserved (not trivial if using stock low-level api)
- Allows optional validation and transformation (mostly stripping and setting defaults) of data via Joi schemas.
API
AirtableLib
: high-level access objectfetchBase
...
AirtableDao
: access object for Airtable TableAirtableCache
: indexed contents of Airtable Base (indexed by airtableId)
Concept
Entities
Entities are preferrably named without "Airtable" in their name, e.g Coupon
, not AirtableCoupon
.
Entities extend AirtableRecord
to have airtableId
required property. Idea is to not strip it
unless absolutely needed. Currently airtable-lib
doesn't do any stripping. Keeping airtableId
is
useful to be able to resolve links in runtime. AirtableCache
always keeps and index of all records
of Base by airtableId
. airtableId
is unique within your Base (not just within Table), that's why
index is built as airtableId > record
, not airtableId > Table > record
.
Linking
Any linked field in Airtable creates link in both directions (between 2 tables). Convention is to "hide" one link (typically "back-link") in Airtable UI to indicate that it's not used (if it's indeed not used and stripped from data by joi schema).
There was an idea to have a "resolve step" when downloading Airtable Base as json, to be able to
replace airtableId
s in links to whole objects. The problem there is that it creates a circular
dependency in javascript which is a very bad thing (e.g you cannot console.log
such object, or
send it over the wire). Decision was made to NOT have a resolve step but instead have a
AirtableCache
with the index of all base records (from airtableId
to Record), so it's possible
to quickly resolve links in runtime. This is a design decision.
Backup / restore
Backing up Airtable base to json file stores all airtableId
s that are used to resolve links.
When restoring from json to Airtable Base airtableId
s cannot be preserved, that's Airtable
limitation, it needs to generate an airtableId
every time an "insert" is made. Restore still works
though, with some extra logic. It relies on existing links in json file, builds a map from
"oldAirtableId" to "newlyGeneratedAirtableId" and this way preserves the linking. Next time backup
to json is made from Airtable base - airtableId
s will be different (non-deterministic), something
to be aware of.
Backing up (as per current Airtable API) does not preserve order of rows. Restoring from json -
does preserve order (but requires to upload records sequentially one-by-one, which is slower
than concurrent uploading). To overcome this limitation it's recommended to specify "sort order" in
AirtableTableSchema
, which allows order to be deterministic. Same order needs to be applied in the
UI, to be consistent between UI and json export.
Packaging
engines.node >= 10.13
: Latest Node.js LTSmain: dist/index.js
: commonjs, es2018types: dist/index.d.ts
: typescript types/src
folder with source*.ts
files included