Skip to content
Ian Thompson
About me
My Blog
Blog Articles
More
Share
Explore
Blog Articles

Airtable as a database

A quick summary of how I got Airtable to talk to my Webflow online catalogue.
I'm working on a project for a client that requires a little more data handling than usual. It's an online catalogue of about 700 items, packed with sizes, images and descriptions.
To update all this stuff in Webflow where the CMS lives is tooo painful for words and besides, I needed a solution that also worked for creating PDF files of each CMS item.
Step forward Airtable. You can probably do this is other tools, but Airtable is my current daily app of choice for managing our office stuff, so it was a natural choice for handling this job.
First thing to say is you'll have a steep learning curve when it comes to joining up Airtable and Webflow. I used Parabola for this job and quickly discovered lots of pitfalls:
Webflow only allows you to grab 100 CMS items at a time - so in Parabola I had to have 7 different API calls to grab 100 items at a time with an offset each time to grab the next tranch of data.
Make sure your Airtable and Webflow fields are uniquely identifiable. Nightmare when you try figure out which fields come from which app. I named all my Airtable fields at_tablename_FIELDNAME - easy!
You need an Airtable ID field in Webflow. This is what Parabola uses to merge the tables. No ID then big mess.
You need a modified field in both Airtable and Webflow. Use the formula in Airtable to create a modified field and push that date to a field in Webflow - don't use the Webflow generated modified field as you wont end up comparing like for like.
Do all your updates in Airtable and set Parabola to run overnight. You'll quickly eat through Parabola credits trying to see if your recipe works or not.

⁠
5e5a8ee49e288f715be59121_parabola airtable webflow.png
⁠
⁠
Parabola grabs all the data in Webflow merges it together. It then grabs Airtable rows and Joins the Airtable and Webflow rows together by using the common Airtable ID. I have an If/Else in the recipe that compares the Airtable modified date with the corresponding field in Webflow and if true then it filters out the unmodified rows. The whole thing then pushes the updated rows back into Webflow.
Somewhat complicated but if I can do it then so can you! I used A
ron Korenblit's video here
⁠
to get started and to get an overview of what to do.
I used this bit of info to figure out how to grab an offset of Webflow data
⁠
(limited to the first 100 rows... )
UPDATE: Parabola now has a native Webflow import module so the 7 separate Webflow API imports in the illustration above no longer apply, Just one easy import using the new module makes life a tone easier.

Want to print your doc?
This is not the way.
Try clicking the ⋯ next to your doc name or using a keyboard shortcut (
CtrlP
) instead.