I just realized that Make might not be giving people any way to easily transition their old Airtable connections (using Airtable’s API key) over to the new Airtable connections (oAuth or Personal Access Tokens).
Airtable is discontinuing API Keys in February 2024 in favor of oAuth and Personal Access Tokens, but as it stands right now in Make, you are required to create a whole new connection to Airtable – instead of being given the ability to modify an existing Airtable connection.
What this likely means is that people will need to go through every single Airtable module in every single Make scenario and update each module to use the new connection.
Some of my clients have (literally) hundreds of Make scenarios with dozens of Airtable modules within each scenario. So this is a transition that could take hours of manual labor.
(I’m not sure how Zapier is planning on handling this transition.)
In the grand scheme of things, a few hours to update 100’s Make Scenarios is still better than a few days of updating one Microsoft PowerAutomate Flow.
I was actually quite impressed how quickly Make added the OAuth connection, but you are right this will be so much mindless clicking to exchange those connection! Same situation, here multiple client accounts with Airtable&Make scenarios.
Well at least it will be a good conversation starter to older clients Those breaking changes really give jobs, don’t they…
I just recalled that there is this legacy Integromat Dev Tools Chrome Extension! I rarely us it, but it allows for some mass changes on scenario. I have just tested it and it has “Swap connection” feature.
The way it works is:
you change connection on one of the modules → here “Search Records”
and if you do not specify the target module it will change it on all Airtable modules
I tested it on a single scenario and seems to be working OK
We often tell ourselves – it could be worse – in an attempt to gain a little comfort in the miserable situation we got sucked into.
Let’s face the realities that Dan got it [architecturally] right, and Make blew it. What product designer would ever place authentication at the component level, knowing full well that a single recipe could have many references to the same service? Clowns.
Certainly, you want an automation recipe to have the agility to call upon the same service using different security contexts, but this is the exception - not the rule. Clowns.
Just another - in a long list of reasons - to be wary of the glue-factories.
Congratulations, @Hannah_Wiginton, on making the authentication transition as seamless as possible for your customers!
Unfortunately, confirming what @bfrench said about clowns working at Make.com, I just got confirmation from Make’s support team today that there will NOT be any easy way to transition old Airtable connections to new Airtable connections.
So thank you so much, @Greg_vonF, for finding & documenting that partial workaround for all of us with the unsupported but apparently still-working Integromat DevTool!
Everybody should note that this will STILL be a very time-consuming process for everybody to manually transition all of their Airtable scenarios in Make, but at least that tool will save us a significant amount of time!
I’ve never used the DevTool before, so thank you for explaining how to use it.
Here is the email that I received from Make today:
Unfortunately, it will be required to change all the connections manually or with the use of our DevTool.
Haha, thank you! I freelanced with Steve and the Apple Executive Team for 6 years, speaking onstage at all of their major events and speaking at their first 21 Apple Retail Store grand openings!
LOL!!! And it was company policy to smile without showing teeth, too!
Those breaking changes really give jobs, don’t they…
