Airtable feature: Delete multiple records

shrey-42 · April 18, 2021, 2:41am

Hi. I recently came across a use-case where i had to delete thousands of records in Airtable.
The best way to do that is to call the DELETE endpoint for a batch of max. 10 records, and loop it.

But, the current Airtable node does not support passing multiple record IDs at a time, if i’m not mistaken.

This is the necessary API call for this operation:

curl -v -X DELETE https://api.airtable.com/v0/<base_id>/<table_name> \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY" \
  -G \
  --data-urlencode 'records[]=recQSpD8h91I1d850' \
  --data-urlencode 'records[]=receGaAnw7n1Ksu4T'

I also tried achieving this via the HTTP node.
But, surprisingly, there was a limitation there as well. The HTTP node does not allow Body parameters for DELETE operations. And i couldn’t make an API call with the data in the Query parameters.
Will raise another FR for this.

I finally implemented this with Axios, in a Function node.

Kindly add this feature.
Thanks.

RicardoE105 · April 19, 2021, 12:12am

Ahh yes. Actually, the Node should do the batching for you. Send branches of 10 records.

btw where did you find that the max is 10 records? I could not find it in the docs.

shrey-42 · April 19, 2021, 1:25am

I just found it somewhere in the Airtable community forum. I might be wrong though.

Update: Tried an API call for 10+ records. Gives an Error 422 (Invalid Request). I guess then 10 is really the limit.

Jorge_M · April 19, 2021, 7:06am

Hi,
I was actually searching for same this weekend, but I was sending regular delete records, until I found this post and discovered you can do in 10. When you go to the API documentation, in the API example, it does make that reference.