Import Records, Build Tables And Get Change Alerts With Airtable

Your team keeps the real list in Airtable: the clients, the content calendar, the inventory, the applicants. It works until the list needs to talk to something else. Orders arrive in another system and have to be keyed in. A record changes and nobody downstream hears about it. Someone leaves the company and their access lingers. Airtable can handle each of those through an API, a way for one piece of software to ask another to do work, so another tool, a short script or an AI assistant can keep the base current for you.

What Airtable does

Airtable describes itself as a cloud-based collaboration service that combines the simplicity of a spreadsheet with the complexity of a database, with APIs for managing bases, tables, records, and more. A base is Airtable’s word for one database; a table is a sheet inside it; a record is a row. On APIs.io we list the surfaces separately: the Records API for creating, reading, updating and deleting rows, the Tables API and Fields API for changing the shape of a base, the Bases API for listing bases and reading their schemas, the Comments API for discussion on a record, the Webhooks API for change notifications, and the enterprise Users API and Groups API for who gets in.

What you can get done

We map Airtable’s operations to two business capabilities. The everyday record and table work shows up most clearly in the workflows below, so I will take the two capabilities first and then the recipes.

Webhook & Event Subscription Management

A webhook is a standing request: tell this address whenever something in this base changes. It is how a record edit in Airtable can trigger an email, a Slack message or an update in another system without anyone polling. There are five operations.

• POST /bases/{baseId}/webhooks creates a webhook on a base, pointing at the address that should hear about changes.
• GET /bases/{baseId}/webhooks lists the webhooks already set up on a base.
• GET /bases/{baseId}/webhooks/{webhookId}/payloads reads the queued notifications, page by page, so nothing is missed if your side was down.
• POST /bases/{baseId}/webhooks/{webhookId}/refresh extends a webhook so it keeps running.
• DELETE /bases/{baseId}/webhooks/{webhookId} removes one.

Identity & Access Management

For an enterprise account, this is how people get into Airtable and get taken out again. SCIM is a standard that lets your identity provider, the system you already use to add and remove staff, create and delete users and groups in other services automatically. There are 12 operations.

• POST /Users creates a user in Airtable from your identity provider.
• GET /Users lists the users it manages.
• POST /Groups creates a group, such as a department, that can be granted access together.
• PATCH /Groups/{groupId} changes a group’s membership.
• DELETE /Groups/{groupId} removes a group.

Workflows that put it together

A workflow is a recipe: several API calls made in a set order, each using what the last one returned. They are written in Arazzo, an open format for describing them, and Airtable has 21 of them on APIs.io. These are the ones a business reaches for first.

• Bulk Import Records creates a batch of records in a table and checks the import landed.
• Add a Table with Fields adds a new table to an existing base and then adds a field to it.
• Enrich Records finds records with empty fields and fills them in.
• Archive Stale Records finds records that match a staleness formula and deletes them.
• Comment on Record confirms a record exists, then adds a comment to it.
• Audit Base Schemas lists the bases you can reach and inspects the structure of one.
• Consume Webhook Payloads finds a webhook and drains its queued notifications.
• Deprovision a SCIM User finds a user by username and removes them.

Getting started

Airtable is a freemium, hosted service with self-serve signup: you call Airtable’s endpoint, and the account you already have is enough to begin. The Web API introduction is the front door, the webhooks overview explains the change notifications above, and cursor pagination covers how to read long lists a page at a time. For access, a personal access token is the simplest route for your own scripts, and OAuth integrations are for a tool that acts on behalf of other people’s accounts. On APIs.io you can browse the Airtable profile, the Records API, the Webhooks API and the Tables API. Take the spreadsheet you paste into Airtable every week and run it through the bulk import workflow instead.