airtable-fetch

A module that helps fetch an entire Airtable base or parts of it. This can be useful for running a proxy to avoid the 5/req per second API Limit.

Usage

const { AirtableFetch } = require("airtable-fetch");

or

import AirtableFetch from "airtable-fetch";

then setup with your BaseID, the structure of the views you want to fetch and your API key. The key can also be provided in the AIRTABLE_API_KEY environment variable:

const refresh = AirtableFetch(
  "appYOURBASEID",
  { TableX: ["ViewA", "ViewB"], TableY: ["ViewC"] },
  "YOURAPIKEY"
);

This function returns a promise. So if you just want the data once:

const data = await AirtableFetch(/*setup stuff*/)();

The resulting data uses the _rawJson fields from Airtable and has the following structure:

{
  "TableX": {
    "ViewA": [
      {
        "id": "recsH4J7VZkhCDUVJ",
        "fields": {/*your actual table fields */},
        "createdTime": "2017-07-26T09:44:36.000Z"
      },
      /*...*/
    ],
    "ViewB": [/*...*/]
  },
  "TableY" : {
    "ViewC": [/*...*/]
  }
}

In a proxy scenario you might want to keep the function around to refresh the data periodically. Here's a little example of that using the handy json-server.

const { AirtableFetch } = require("airtable-fetch");
const schedule = require("node-schedule");
const jsonServer = require("json-server");
 
const refresh = AirtableFetch("appYOURBASEID", {
  TableX: ["ViewA", "ViewB"],
  TableY: ["ViewC"]
});
const server = jsonServer.create();
 
const refreshJob = schedule.scheduleJob("*/5 * * * *", function() {
  refresh().then(newData => server.use(jsonServer.router(newData)));
});
 
refreshJob.invoke();
server.listen(3000);

Caveats

Fetching the entire base is my goal, but while the Airtable Schema API is not public, I can't. Once it becomes generally available I'd like fetch everything by default so the module can have the desired simplicity.

This kind of naive approach for a proxy server doesn't really scale to huge bases, but neither does Airtable, really, so its fine (for me, for now).

Changelog

0.1.2

• update dependencies

0.1.1

• update dependencies

0.1.0

• intial release