Impact of Airtable’s Expiring Attachment Links update

  • Hi,

    I assume that everyone who uses Airtable has gotten their email regarding the upcoming security change on incorporating expiring attachment links.

    For everyone who uses this plugin as a way to show Airtable images on their website, this change – if I’m seeing this correctly – will have a big impact and might result in broken image links.

    I’m wondering whether anyone has ideas for solutions to this issue which could be implemented into the plugin – if that is possible at all.

    • This topic was modified 2 years, 11 months ago by tomzorz.
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  • Here’s what I feel is the most relevant item from the announcement:

    Any attachment URLs obtained via the public API and the CSV export functionality will expire after a few hours.

    It seems to me that this could just mean that you’ll need to set AirPress’s cache to expire on the same timeline as AirTable’s attachment URLs. However AirTable really doesn’t want you to use attachments on their servers as content on publicly-accessible sites; from their Help Article on the change:

    We have and will continue to discourage [the use of Airtable to host files on the internet].

    What AirTable would prefer us to do is to use “Google Drive, Box, or other 3rd party attachment storage services” if we want to access attachments from outside of AirTable itself. I think that’s what I’ll be planning to do with the one site I use AirPress on. Performance should be better, too.

    Thread Starter tomzorz

    (@tomzorz)

    It seems to me that this could just mean that you’ll need to set AirPress’s cache to expire on the same timeline as AirTable’s attachment URLs.

    I’ve thought of that too, but Airtable isn’t (yet) clear on how they will implement this change. Perhaps every image will have its own timeline, starting at creation of itself, rather than a timeline per table/base. That would make this method of having a shorter Airpress cache method invalid.

    If not – and the expiring of attachment links is per table/base and not per image – then this could be a valid method.
    Another one – again, if the expiring of attachment links is per table/base and not per image – could be to make Airpress check the first random attachment link, whenever it needs to serve data, and poll whether the attachment link is broken or alive. If dead, fetch new airtable data.

    But, as you state, since Airtable discourages it so much, I’m coming to terms with the fact that a 3rd party storage service will be needed in the future. Most likely this is out of Airpress’ scope.

    • This reply was modified 2 years, 11 months ago by tomzorz.
    • This reply was modified 2 years, 11 months ago by tomzorz.
Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
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