Airtable Schema Generator

The Airtable Schema Generator is a tool we developed alongside this web app that generates helper functions on top of the basic Airtable Javascript client. It generates these helper functions in accordance with your Airtable Schema. The details on how it works and all the settings available can be found on its readme. Below are details about how it is configured on our repositories.

Overview

Whenever the schema on airtable is changed, it's necessary to run the schema generator in order to keep the local files in sync with Airtable. Generally speaking, since schema changes affect every branch immediately, schema updates should be merged separately from a development branch.

The schema can be regenerated with the command yarn generate-schema. You must fill in the AIRTABLE_EMAIL and AIRTABLE_PASSWORD sections of your own .env file and allow password login on Airtable. These credentials are not saved anywhere except on your computer. This allows the schema generator to scrape your schema from Airtable. If you're curious what is happening, change auto-headless in the schema generator's settings in package.json to auto.

The schema generator's settings are in package.json. For the most part, they will not need to be edited. Details are below.

Generated Files

The schema generator outputs 4 files:

airtable.js

This file interacts with the airtable client and exposes the core CRUD functions. It also contains the logic that translates the airtable column names to JS-formatted names. "First Name" becomes "firstName", "Project Group" becomes "projectGroupId" (assuming it is a one-to-one relation field).

request.js

This file contains helper functions for every crud operation for every table. It's a convenience layer over airtable.js

schema.js

This file is a schema mapping that describes all the table and column names in a JS format. The app should never use this file but it is necessary for airtable.js to translate records to JS-readable variable names. It should be used as a reference to know what a column name has been translated to.

schema.json

This is a JSON version of schema.js for reference.

peoplepower-web

Schema Generator Settings:

"airtable-schema-generator": {
  "output": "src/lib/airtable",
  "input": "src/lib/airtable",
  "defaultView": "Grid view",
  "mode": "auto-headless",
  "airlock": true
}

• output signifies where to save the generated files
• input signifies where to look for input files (currently unused, there are no input files)
• defaultView signifies which View to use on Airtable. It uses the same view across all tables
• mode signifies how to fetch the schema. The options are detailed on the schema generator repo, but auto-headless will scrape the schema for you with no unnecessary windows
• airlock signifies that we want the airlock version of the airtable.js file.

peoplepower-node

"airtable-schema-generator": {
  "output": "airtable",
  "mode": "auto-headless",
  "overwrite": false,
  "schemaMeta": {
    "Owner": {
      "lookupFields": [
        "Email"
      ]
    }
  }
}

• output signifies where to output generated files
• mode signifies how to get the files
• overwrite signifies that we do not want to overwrite airtable.js. This is set to true because on node, we need one extra line in our airtable.js to make it work. If the schema generator is updated, however, it's crucial to grab the latest version of airtable.js by setting this flag to false.
• schemaMeta describes any extra helper functions we want to create. In this case, we want to create a helper function that lets us look up owners by their email. This extra function is created in request.js