When the extension doesn’t want to print anymore, it might be that there are too many records in the view you are using for the Page Designer extension. It apparently can only handle up to ca 1.500 records.
Feedback from Airtable Support which hints to printing “records in a specific view”, but also works for issues with “current record” printing:
They’ve informed me that the reason for this behavior is a result of the number of records in the view being leveraged by the extension. From the specific extension you are printing from, it appears like the option to print “records in a specific view” is selected. For the view “forms + overzicht per project” (which has > 1500 records), the result will generate a PDF with over 1500 pages.
To remedy this, they recommend creating a new view and filtering down the view to a number the computer can reasonably handle. Then, printing these records in batches.
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Is that suggesting that there’s a limit to the amount of records that can be paged through, of ~1500? I might have to build a view for where I wasn’t aware of this.
TBH, I’m hoping there’s some love thrown at Page Designer. Feeling clunkier to use with every passing year.
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At last year’s DareTable conference, Airtable mentioned that there was a Page Designer 2.0 in the works. However, there was no timeline or any other info. Maybe there will be an update at DareTable later this month?
Thank you for this information! This is very helpful.
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Not only Page Designer extension, but many extensions that ready the number of records when they load they suffer under load if too many records in the view, so even barcode generation extension for instance when it loads (not when it generates). While they don’t stop as in case of Page Designer, they still hang Airtable when there are many records. I guess that is the reason Airtable forcibly reducing the number of active extensions. Users that pay enterprise plan likely have a higher performance hardware and faster internet connection (not to be biased but often companies have better connection than average home connection). Otherwise I can’t explain why would Airtable charge 10 dollars for lowest plan but try to push users to enterprise plan to get more extensions but most extensions are likely not used by the enterprise users because they would use other integration like Make/Zapier/API/Webhooks /scripts etc anything that is more stable and automated.
So if it wasn’t the performance issue with extensions, I believe more people would use more extensions and then they wouldn’t end up in a situation they create extensions that few people use.
Because turning on and off extension and going through the menu and it asks if me if I really want to turn off the extension (as if it was asking me if it should pull out my nail or not). Not convenient.