createRecord vs. createRecords (part 1)

One of the actions we’ll come back to again and again as Airtable script developers it creating records in an Airtable table.

Unique values

Let’s imagine that we have a set of records and we want to get the unique values for a particular field. In this demo, we have a number of “people” records and each person works for a company. We’ll use an Airtable script to get the unique set of companies across all people.

3 ways to loop

Looping (or iterating) over the set of records returned from a table query will probably feature in most of your Airtable scripts. It is worth getting comfortable with how to do this. As ever in programming, there are a number of ways to approach looping and we’ll outline 3 JavaScript methods here.

Deleting records

Most of the time, we are adding data to our Airtable bases, but, occassionally, we might need to delete data. This post will show a method for deleting data based on some attribute of each record.

User input with buttons

In this post we’re going to write a script that gets some input from the user that changes what the script does - in this case, either proceed with an operation or cancel the operation.

Aggregating numbers

Airtable is great at applying formulas to record values and has ways of grouping and aggregating data, but it doesn’t have a built-in way of comparing each record to a group total. Here’s our problem for this post:

Adding two numbers

In this script we’re going to take two numbers, from two different fields in our table, add the together and write the result to the 3rd field.

Displaying data from your base

Many Airtable scripts will:

• read some data in one of the base tables
• do something with the data (manipulate it, aggregate it etc)
• write it back to the table (or another table)

Getting started

To use Airtable Scripts on your base, you need to enable the scripting block. Airtable comes with a number of blocks that enable a specific set of functionality on your base - graphs and charts, CSV imports, page designer for printing data and so on. Learn more about Airtable Blocks here.

Need help with Airtable?

We develop Airtable scripts, bases and integrations for our clients - from single-person startups to large corporations, from non-profits to commercial enterprises. If you need help getting your Airtable initiative in place, get in touch here for a informal chat about how we can help you.