Urgent: Open Item Details with Proper Interactions (Previewing Airtable's Record Details URL)

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1

Hi Glide Team,

Because Airtable allows us to chat, annotate, and leave comments on top of images and videos, we want to make our List Details Page to project Airtable’s record details (with Airtable’s interface) as we can’t currently view uploaded brand assets/files by our clients, and they can’t comment or interact with the files at all.

How can we set that up?

Much appreciated. Thank you.

2

I’ve been working with Airtable for a long time, and unfortunately Airtable’s user-specific permissions are difficult to work with.

In my experience, you won’t be able to do what you wanted. Instead, you’ll need to get your clients to sign up as Airtable users and then give them access to your custom app in Airtable Interface.

A bummer for sure.

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Thank you @Jarvis for your time.

Here’s another question, can I replace these Airtable features on Glide?

  • To make my clients/teams browse and view photos and videos related to tasks/requests.
  • To point, annotate, and leave comments/feedback on top of media files (pics, vids, etc).

Then I wouldn’t need to use Airtable’ UI or Apps any more.

4

To answer your questions:

Yes, you can make your team browse multiple photos. There are some limitations:

  • Let’s start with the positive first - lets say you have multiple images in Airtable. In Airtable, you have a slider where you can slide through the images. You can do that in Glide as well, and can even customize the size of the carousel to be big, small, medium, etc. So this isn’t a limitation but a feature parity.

  • However, as you know in Airtable if you click on an image, that image expands to full view. In Glide, you can’t do that. Workaround? The user will need to right-click the image and select “Open in new tab”. Not very intuitive but that’s the only workaround I’ve found now.

  • In Airtable, you can slide through multiple videos. In Glide, you can’t display videos on a slider, so you can only show one video, either the 1st or the last attachment in your Airtable attachment field. The workaround is that you can show a list of the video links, where the user will need to click each link to play them in a new tab.
  • A huge advantage of Airtable, that Glide unfortunately lacks. You can’t do this in Glide. The less attractive workaround? Glide has a “comment” component that you can add to your record view, and people will leave comments on that the old-fashioned way. The user can also attach images in their comments through a couple more clicks (not officially supported, it’s a workaround).

I agree, this is a very big win. The trade-off is that you have to sacrifice annotations.

This is also the exact use-case for which we’re building our own client portal now based on Airtable. We’ve been using Airtable for the last 7 years and Glide over the last 6 months, even though we’ve been using Glide on and off for around 3 years for personal projects. In the last 6 months we’ve probably built and rebuilt our portal 4 times from scratch, because we’ve faced a lot of issues to make sure the app performs fast and syncs quickly with Airtable. Right now I’m rebuilding it for the fifth and final time, each time getting more and more faster.

You can find some of my learnings here as well: "Backend" database. Airtable v Glide Tables

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@Jarvis Brilliant. Great info.

Then here’s my last question:
(I can automate newly added users on Glide to be Airtable commenter users)

How can I add an action on Glide for each record to open the records details tab/modal on Airtable, so that then they can use the annotations feature?