Airtable Pro Tip: Overcoming Airtable Scripting Limitations with Pipedream
I’ve been exploring Airtable Scripting recently and found it pretty helpful. It allows a ton of possibilities within the Airtable console.
What is Airtable Scripting? Check out the announcement and the guide.
My tip here is regarding the limited functionalities available in the Airtable Scripting environment for Developers. Not all Javascript libraries are available in the Airtable Scripting environment. You cannot use any npm packages, plus it even lacks some default JS libraries.
My solution — Create a Pipedream workflow as an API that does all the stuff — which in an Airtable environment is a limitation. The API would run through the steps and would return the response as JSON.
This will reduce the overload of hosting another API on Heroku, or similar alternatives, and Pipedream is Free for most cases.
How I used Pipedream — Created a workflow having an API endpoint to convert Airtable’s Attachment Image URL to Base64 encode image (to push it to another API). Similarly, there could be a million other use-cases.
Hope someone found it useful :)
