Add manual pagination to Airtable Search for large datasets

Feature Requests Nodes
1

It would help if the Airtable node’s Search Records operation supported manual pagination through Airtable’s pageSize and offset parameters.

My use case

We use a self-hosted n8n instance to synchronize a large and growing Airtable dataset containing more than 40,000 relatively large records.

We need the complete dataset, so we currently have to enable Return All. This makes the execution very resource-intensive: it is slow, difficult to test, and can cause our n8n instance to crash before the synchronization completes.

Being able to retrieve and process one page at a time would make this workflow much more reliable. Each page could be processed before requesting the next one, following a pattern similar to Loop Over Items, without asking the Airtable node to retrieve the entire dataset at once.

Current limitation

Airtable’s API supports cursor-based pagination: it accepts pageSize, returns an offset when another page is available, and accepts that offset in the following request.

The n8n Airtable node handles pagination internally when Return All is enabled. However, when Return All is disabled, it only returns a limited set of records and does not expose the next-page offset. A workflow therefore cannot request the following page using the dedicated Airtable node.

This can be implemented manually with an HTTP Request node, but that means rebuilding behavior that belongs naturally in the Airtable integration. Native pagination would be clearer, more maintainable, and easier to use.

Requested behavior

When Return All is disabled, the Airtable node should allow users to:

  • configure the page size;
  • provide an offset returned by the previous execution;
  • receive the next-page offset in the output when more records are available;
  • stop the loop when the last page returns no offset.

This would allow large tables to be synchronized in controlled batches.

Resources

Airtable pagination documentation:

Implementation PR:

The PR introduces these options in Airtable node version 2.3 while preserving the behavior of workflows using version 2.2 or earlier. It includes tests for page size and offset handling, the final page, downloaded attachments, and backward compatibility.

It also incorporates the review feedback from the earlier attempt:

Are you willing to work on this?

Yes. I have already implemented the proposed behavior in PR #37766 and am willing to address additional review feedback.