For this, do you mean your “Clock in” form will write to the Hours Tracker table, and your “Start Assignment” form will write to the Assignments table? Do you collect any further info that the user has to fill in for those forms?
@ThinhDinh Yep, that’s exactly it. I’m basically creating a timestamped “clock session” and a timestamped “assignment” record that will be closed out when the user either clocks out or ends the assignment. Everything goes through the FORMS table.
I’ve started working something with the Actions, which seem to be similar to the airtable automations; when I posted earlier I hadn’t messed with them at all yet, so now I’m starting to see how I can make it work.
If you don’t need the user to fill in anything else, the button can use the “Add row” action to the destination table with the info you need. For “rolling up” to get “current clock session” or “current assignment”, you can explore a combination of query columns to get the list of “Clock in” and “Clock out” rows of a user, and then a single value column > last to get the rowID of the latest row, if that’s what you need.
Does anyone know the status of the Glide - Airtable back sync issue?
The number one dealbreaker for us right now is: With an Airtable backend users need to wait between 30secs to 5+minutes after they created a record to finally do sth. with the record in Glide.
Example scenarios
Scenario #1: User creates Record A > After that User sets a new status (e.g. “publish”) for the record by clicking a button > everything works in the Frontend > some minutes later Airtable syncs back to Glide with the old status, i.e. overwrites Glide changes
Scenario #2: User creates sth. in Glide > User reloads page (because users sometimes just do weird things) > information are lost in Glide - in the best case they already landed in Airtable and are available several minutes later again after the back sync.
Scenario #3: User creates a new record A (e.g. Worker) > User needs to create another record B (e.g. Document) on top of A > Since Airtable hasn’t synced back yet the record/relation A doesn’t really exist even though we made it visible in the Frontend for the user > A isn’t linked to B
We know Airtable sync is slow and we’ve tried to improve it for a few quarters. At this point we’ve paused work on Airtable sync to focus on improving Big Tables first, which will host the data in the next version of Airtable sync.
Apologies, but tl;dr: we don’t expect that we will improve Airtable sync this year, and we recommend using Glide Tables or Big Tables instead.
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Ok, thanks for the fast response and info!
I actually think this is the best option. I think maybe a partnership with a tool like Whalesync could be a great option for syncing Glide Tables and Airtable.
I personally would prefer using Big Tables at this point, there are just some dependencies I have with Airtable that won’t allow me to shift.
Whalesync is a YC company and they specialize in database syncing, I.e Webflow to Airtable, Airtable to Notion, etc.
A good Glide Big Tables integration would be a great solution I think, and would allow you to not have to worry about this ongoing Airtable sync stuff.
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Yes, we met with Whalesync last week and are looking at adding a Big Tables integration.
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What is the status with Whalesync?
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Airtable’s Back Sync will therefore still not work for basic GlideTables - only Big Tables. Right? Or will it be possible to convert GlideTables and Airtable with the frontend logic to Glide Big Tables?
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So there is no solution at all to access Glide’s internal tables to push an Airtable record into Glide or trigger the fetching (sync) automatically? Glide won’t provide any API endpoint to trigger a manual fetch (sync) or immediate data sync from Airtable?