Feedback - Airtable to Softr migration

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1

I have spent the day moving our main application from Airtable data to SoftrDB and whilst there is a good video and slides explaining the process, I thought it might be worth passing on a few things I’ve noticed today.
The application is not large and is for our internal team, so I have been able to deactivate the logins ahead of the change. The Airtable database is about 10 tables and not huge. The Softr app is 25 pages and mostly manually set up, though there were some vibe-coded blocks.

After creating a new base, the import from Airtable went fine. I haven’t got any rollups in there but had been warned that lookups might break, which they did. Not every one, which is a bit odd, but in Softr you could see the lookup fields but they weren’t populating. The settings looked fine, but I had so recreate duplicates and then delete the originals to make them work. In other instances they filled with data, but without colours. Again recreating them fixed that.

Then I turned to the application itself. I generally have List and Table blocks, so I changed the source to Softr and in almost all cases, the layout of the block corrupted. It seemed to lose the first field in the block and then add some or all of the available fields. The sections remained and the formatting stayed, but I had to compare the block to the Airtable based app for each page and set them up again. If the field was found, then the settings (Tooltips etc) remained, but if I had to recreate the field, then I had to customise it all over again.

Then, having done all the blocks on all the pages, I went back and checked the action buttons. Where these had related fields (like an Edit button) I had to tidy up the fields in the same way as all the blocks. All of the ‘click-to-open’ settings worked without changes.

Then I looked at the AI Coded blocks, which I mainly use for card displays and a dashboard. I changed the source and the block broke, but typing ‘rebuil;d block’ fixed almost all of them in one pass.

I then republished and tested and I think it’s all ok - about 7 hrs work for an app with around 700 records and 25 pages. We had no problem with Airtable, but since it’s US hosted unless you pay silly costs, we were forced to move.

Hope that’s helpful to someone.

2

Thanks for the feedback Simon! Sounds like a LOT of work. Almost as if starting over from scratch with a new Softr base would be better, especially when you have an established Airtable base with many relationships.

Please let us know of other issues and differences you find now that the bulk of your migration is done. As long term AT/Softr Business users, we appreciate the feedback.

3

I recently moved all my data from SmartSuite database to Softr DB and the biggest issue I found was with the date fields. When I imported data it formatted everything into US format. I had to manually check every record which took a long time. There may have been a workaround for this but as I’d scheduled and outage I had no option but to continue. Glad it’s done now though and I have evening in Softr (front end apps, database and workflows)

Just waiting on a few key features from Softr and it will be great :blush:

4

Almost ready to let the users back on. I also found that all the search boxes were mucked up - the fields that they search on had all changed, so that it kept the first field I’d chosen, removed all of the others and then added the index field and the recordID field. It did this through the whole application.
I think that you can see some of this happening when you change the source on a block as it says ‘updating fields’ or similar and then goes on to muck them up - oh well.