Working with the AirTable API
Learn more about AirTable integration possibilities and how Grey Giant can help you solve your AirTable API needs.
1. Using AirTable Extensions
Whether you have an inventory management system, a custom CRM or another AirTable use-case, there are plenty of pre-built AirTable Extensions on the AirTable Extension Marketplace. AirTable themselves as well as other AirTable developers have created a handful of tools and services to help you stretch your AirTable Bases just a bit further to help your business’ custom needs.
Using the AirTable’s extension system is very straightforward and easy to set up. Simply find the AirTable extension, install it, and walk through the setup built by the developer. You can have anything from Marketing Integrations tools, third-party service integrations or some more simple visualization and data transformation tools. Additionally, AirTable offers “custom scripts” as an extension. This is a piece of code that can be written to integrate with third party systems, other tables or bases and be built to your exact needs.
2. Using AirTable Automations
A personal favorite of the Grey Giant team, AirTable’s automations are an extremely useful tool. With AirTable automations you are able to update other records, tables or even bases with automations. Like extensions, automations have extensive use. However, AirTable’s automation system is event driven. This means when records are updated or added, AirTable is able to send an event to be processed.
AirTable’s extension library does have some extensions useful for the automations’ functionality. However, our favorite part of automations is being able to integrate custom scripts. These scripts when coupled with Cloud Services provide a robust and highly customizable business information flow that is unique to your business and needs.
3. Using the AirTable API
If you need a completely custom setup and services you can’t find out of the box with AirTable Extensions or automations, the AirTable API might be something your business investigates. Like Extensions and Automations, the AirTable API can interact with your custom bases, tables and records. However, unlike the two provided AirTable services, this functionality can, and most likely will happen completely outside the AirTable Ecosystem.
Use cases for the AirTable API may include systems that process information outside of AirTable, but the final result should be recorded inside your AirTable base. For example, maybe you have a QuickBooks integration that processes your inventory and eventually will send high level counts to your AirTable base. The system would do its calculations and measurements in your integration tool, and then eventually push over the insights and highlights to your AirTable bases.
4. Using AirTable Webooks
Another useful integration methodology would be to use Webhooks. Webhooks are useful when you need to send information from AirTable to your third-party services.
Most webhooks use cases are highly complex and custom. While Grey Giant is capable of doing work revolving webhooks, we have found that most of the integrations we’ve faced have been built, and utilized through AirTable Extensions, Automations or the API. There are rare use cases for it that might involve a lot more data transformation before it can be used by your third party service.
Note: Webhooks are only available to enterprise accounts. So you won’t be able to use these on free or lower-tier paid accounts.
A Cloud based use case with AirTable Automations
We’ve recently integrated AirTable with a custom application. In essence, the client wanted to aggregate all the platform data in an easy-to-use data warehouse. We chose AirTable as the final location of the data, because it allows for non-developers to easily built views, charts and reports on all their platform data.
We used the AirTable automations & Extensions tools to create custom scripts that sent over event data to Amazon Web Services Cloud tools. These custom Cloud Services transformed and processed the data from their application and pushed over the data on a weekly basis to their AirTable bases.
The client was very pleased with the data and how their team was able to create all different sorts of slices of data of their information. From account views all the way down to grouping users by certain properties and knowing the data was up-to-date and gave them real insight into their active userbase.
Experienced AirTable Extension, Automation and WebHook Development
Grey Giant Technologies has worked with AirTable extensions, AirTable API and automations frequently. Integrating data into different services is a strong service that we offer, and we work diligently and thoroughly to make sure we understand your data and it’s purposes before starting any integration.
Before plunging into the freelancing world or hiring a one-off contractor to integrate your custom services and vendor APIs, consider Grey Giant Technologies for your next integration needs.
If you’d like to learn more, contact us and set up a time to chat!