i was excited to try Glide to create an Airtable portal, but unfortunately, Glide doesn’t actually provide full support for Airtable! Glide doesn’t support single-select fields nor multi-select fields from Airtable.
For example, in the screenshot below, all of these fields are single-select fields in Airtable, but they only show up as plain text fields in Glide.
So this is a huge dealbreaker for us.
We would only be able to use Glide if it actually supported the critically-important field types from Airtable.
Looks like we’ll have to go with Noloco instead of Glide.
It may be a text field in Glide, but you can still use a choice component with single select or multi-select enabled to fill it.
I don’t use Airtable, so I don’t know the in’s and out’s of integrating it with Glide, but I’m pretty sure single select fields are represented as text fields in Glide, and multi-select fields are represented as arrays in Glide. I’m almost positive that you can point a single select choice component to a single select Airtable column. What I’m not sure about is if you can point a multi-select choice component to a multi-select Airtable column. I would lean towards it being possible based on past threads, but that is something you would have to experiment with.
The only thing you have to set up beforehand is a table with all of your possible choices.
I would be curious to see some screenshots or a video of what you tried. I feel like it should at least be partially doable, but I don’t really know. I don’t have a way to test it myself without creating my own Airtable account and getting familiar with it first.
At least for the single select, I don’t really see a problem with it being a text column, unless Glide is not letting you choose it as the destination for a choice component for some reason. I would really like to know what you tried, for you to say it’s not possible.
There’s a lot of ways to feed available choices into a choice component, so I’m not sure why a linked record would be the only option here.
It is compatible to some level (especially if you use Airtable purely as a database without all of the Airtable niceties), but it’s also like trying to get cats and dogs to get along. Airtable is a bit of a different animal. It’s a typical database like everything else, but it has some extra features that are highly specific to Airtable only. It might be how Airtable’s API presents data to Glide that makes it complicated, but there are some fundamental differences in how Airtable handles data and how Glide handles data. I know Glide has done some things to make it more compatible with Airtable, and the way some of that stuff works just weirds me out, because it’s so different from how I’m used to Glide working under normal circumstances, and in some cases, just doesn’t make sense to me how it can work.
Again, if you can show what you tried, we can at least see if it’s something in your configuration, a bug, or if it truly isn’t designed to work that way.
You can see my screenshot from my original post above, where there is no ability to map single-select fields to any sort of a dropdown menu selection in Glide.
Unfortunately, Glide just dropped the ball here, because every other Airtable portal on the market fully supports single-select fields, multi-select fields, lookup fields, rollup fields, and linked record fields.
It looks like Glide doesn’t fully support any of these field types, which unfortunately defeats the purposes of using Glide for the majority of use cases.
Below is a list of all the other Airtable portals that are currently on the market. All of these fully support all of these Airtable field types – Glide is the only one that doesn’t properly work with these field types:
Noloco Softr
MiniExtensions
Stacker
Pory
On2Air Forms
(As a new user to these forums, I am only allowed to hyperlink 2 of the portals above, which is why the bottom 4 portals don’t have links.)
That just shows the data in the data editor. It doesn’t show how you attempted to set up a screen with a choice component to populate the field, so I’m not sure if you have tried it yet.
Single and Multi-select are handled with the choice component.
Linked Records are like Relations in Glide. Linked Records are largely supported as far as I know. They with like relations, but have extra abilities in Glide that you can’t do with other data sources.
Lookups are fully supported.
Rollup are fully supported.
It may not be a drag and drop solution, but all of the ability is definitely there.
Just remember that the data editor in Glide is for back end development. Normally you would handle a lot of this stuff in the user front end, such as the choice component.
Thanks so much, @Jeff_Hager. I read the support article on choice dropdowns, and it looks like Glide only supports that for forms. I don’t even know how to create a form in Glide, but unfortunately, I would need this to work on Glide’s “data grid” for editing records.
But that’s okay – I’ve got this up & running in Noloco for now. I’m fully onboard with Glide being a great solution if people have extremely simple needs, but for full integration with all of Airtable’s functionality, they’ll need to turn elsewhere.
I agree this is a huge oversight and a bit baffling. I tried noloco but unfortunately it is also quite limited and doesn’t work for me. I also ran into a few bugs which made me lose faith in it.
