Hi!
I have been experimenting with Glide for a few hours now and I was hoping to learn more about how to manage user profiles in Glide when using an external database. For instance, I have user profiles stored in Glide while all other data is stored in Airtable. Should I copy my Glide user profiles to Airtable and establish connections to the data there? Can you direct me to a resource where I can read more about this?
Thanks!
You can change your user profile configuration to use an existing or a new table in Airtable.
I had this same conundrum.
Was worried at first that keeping my users table in Airtable would cause issues with Glide, but as Jeff says it is perfectly possible and works well.
I was just about to post about this topic, but you may know the answer to this.
In order to combat missing user information to improve onboarding, I have made a user flow that hides all pages but one upon signup if the role for that user is blank.
Problem is that using an Airtable table for user profiles introduces lag between sign up and being able to reference that new user row to edit. Sometimes writing is unreliable, or sometimes the user is simply not even created (row not created on the Airtable side through API).
If a Glide table was used for user profiles with relations to contact records in an Airtable table, would syncing be theoretically more reliable? Or does the same issue exist no matter the data source?
I don’t use Airtable, so I don’t have much experience with it, and I don’t know much about it’s limitations. I do know that the API that was provided to Glide from Airtable had some limitations that affected performance. There is a recent update to that API which should provide some improvements, so when Glide can work that into their roadmap, they will make the necessary changes on their end.
With all that said, I find it interesting that people have delays when adding or changing data from Glide’s side…including when a new user profile row is generated. I don’t experience those same kinds of issues when using a google sheet. It has always been my understanding that Glide keeps their own copy of your external data, but periodically syncs the data between glide and the external source (eg. Airtable/Google). As long as all logic is handled within Glide, then there should be little to no concern about how long it takes for data to sync from Glide to Airtable. It should already be there in Glide’s copy, which is the only copy that the app itself communicates with.
If you have special logic or formulas within Airtable, then yes, I expect some delay for those calculated values to sync back to glide, because there is an extra step involved that is handled external to Glide. And let’s consider that glide as a whole could be connected to a million different Airtable, Google Sheet and Excel Databases, so for it to keep everyone’s data synchronized every second becomes a bit unreasonable, so that’s why there may be up to a few minutes delay between syncs.
I’ll also add, that those that use Airtable tend to use features that are highly specific to Airtable only, such as linked records, or attachment fields, which don’t always play well with glide, or they work completely different from standard glide column types, so it possibly makes Airtable more reliant on the sync happening between glide and Airtable. If airtable was treated purely as a data source to store data, and none of those “airtable only” column types and features were used, then I wonder if that would allow for things to work better and be more responsive. I really don’t know, since I have only worked with glide tables and google sheets.
Whenever possible, when I use google sheets for some of my projects, I try to avoid any special formatting, or any special formulas inside the sheet. For me, the google sheet is just raw data storage. Anything important happens within Glide. This allows my project to remain responsive without relying on when and how often data is synced with the google sheet. Glide’s copy of the data is always up to date, so it wouldn’t bother me if it took 30 minutes or more for data to sync between Glide and Google. It’s obviously not that slow, but I think you get my point.
If you are having sync issues with the user profile, then yes, you could technically keep using a glide table as the user profile table, and use a single relation to a contacts table. The only issue is that you would need several Lookup columns for any values you want pull into the user profile table to be accessible in the app through the user profile options. Also, if you need to update anything in the contacts, you would have to do it through the single relation. It’s all possible, but just a bit of extra setup.
Not knowing much about how the integration between glide and airtable works, I can’t say if syncing would become more reliable, but it may help to some degree. Maybe those with more Airtable experience can chime in.
Agree with everything @Jeff_Hager says here.
But I do find with a bit of experimentation - Airtable can work really well.
My basic rule of thumb is - if Glide updates an Airtable column - all works pretty much instantly (assume it’s cached)
If a column is updated in Airtable (be it through a formula, an automation, or a user) - it takes a while to sync over to glide.
But I’m absolutely not an expert in this so pay more heed to the Glide experts on this community. I’m a business owner trying to make things work more efficiently by using Airtable and Glide. I’m certainly not an IT Pro - I just happen to have a keen interest in no code and business efficiency! I don’t know a JSON thing from a bit of CSS