Airtable is great, but one pain point is that column names don't have unique IDs. If someone changes a column name in the UI, it can break your code! There are two ways we can make this less brittle:
- Be smart about Airtable permissions: most volunteers should be
Editorsat most. Those who coordinate volunteers and set up workflows should haveCreatorpermissions, but should have a very solid understanding that they shouldn't rename or remove any columns without checking with a tech person. - Normalize Airtable records before working with them in the code by mapping the human-readable column names (e.g.
['Phone Number']) to object properties (phoneNumber).
The way we've implemented this is to create a set of schemas for each table (these live in schema.js) and normalize and denormalize methods. These methods take an Airtable record and a schema definition and basically just replace the keys. You can see some other utilities we've developed around this pattern, like normalizeRecords, in airtable.js.