Airtable.EFCore

Entity Framework Core provider for Airtable.

Uses Airtable.Net library by ngocnicholas.

Based and inspired mostly by Cosmos DB provider by Microsoft.

State of the project and motivation

This project was created to support charity operations of UA Responders charity that runs it's internal operations on Airtable and Azure Functions.

Because Airtable is a good simple UI and database, but lacks good automation facilities, we run some of our automations on Azure Functions in C#.

Currently all operations on Azure Functions are ported to work on top of this provider, and features added are based on needs to support those operations.

Only small subset of LINQ is translated, but there is a foundation to add features as needed.

Changetracking and SaveChangesAsync() works, so you can do full CRUD cycle.

Usage

Create Airtable base

Get Airtable base ID and API key

Install Airtable.EFCore package.

//Register airtable as EF provider
services.AddDbContext<TestDbContext>(o => o.UseAirtable(config.GetValue<string>("BaseId"), config.GetValue<string>("ApiKey")));

Example model:

Create your model. Example uses Inventory Tracking template.

public class TestDbContext : DbContext
{
    public TestDbContext(DbContextOptions options) : base(options)
    {
    }

    public DbSet<DbProductInventory> ProductInventory { get; set; }
    public DbSet<DbManufacturer> Manufacturers { get; set; }

    protected override void OnModelCreating(ModelBuilder modelBuilder)
    {
        modelBuilder.Entity<DbProductInventory>().ToTable("Product Inventory");
        base.OnModelCreating(modelBuilder);
    }
}

public class DbManufacturer
{
    public string Id { get; set; }
    public string Name { get; set; }
    [Column("Contact Name")]
    public string ContactName { get; set; }

    public AirtableAttachment Image { get; set; }
}

public class DbProductInventory
{
    public string Id { get; set; }

    [Column("Units Ordered")]
    public int Ordered { get; set; }

    [Column("Product Name")]
    public string ProductName { get; set; }
}

And you can work with it as with regular EF model!

Translated features

Airtable Views

FromView extension limit querying to specific view.

await db.Manufacturers.FromView("San").FirstOrDefaultAsync(i=>i.Name == "Something");

Airtable formulas translated

C#	Airtable	Comment
=	=	Simple equality operator
Regex.IsMatch	REGEX_MATCH()	No options additional supported by airtable
String.Equals	Equality operator =	Case insensitivity achieved via UPPER function
String.Contains	FIND()	Case insensitivity achieved via UPPER function
&&	AND
||	OR
DateTimeOffset comparison operators	Combination of NOT and IS_AFTER and IS_BEFORE
Entity property reference	Record property reference encoded in {}
Entity primary key reference	RECORD_ID()	With special optimization for query by primary key only

Attachment support

Use property of type AirtableAttachment or ICollection<AirtableAttachment> to work with attachments.