Getting around Airtable database limitations or other ideas

[oivaizmir]

Hey all,

I’m working on an ecommerce marketplace for Africa and multiple language use is essential.

I’ve managed to use Airtable as the source of strings for wrapping text in Adalo successfully, it works great and is far faster for this purpose then the built in Adalo database.

But I am having a problem. While Airtable has unlimited rows, it maxes out at 500 columns which sounds like a lot, but really isn’t that many when you are building out the translations.

When using Adalo I seem stuck to using rows for language choice then grabbing the translation from a column. I’m wondering if there is a way with Adalo to switch this around and transpose?

Another solution would be how with a single click from Adalo, I could select the language ‘eg English’ from multiple Airtable databases at once, so the app recognizes the choice. Right now I could easily solve this problem by just having the user select the language multiple times (one time for each 500 block of translations) but obviously that’s a bit ugly.

Screen shots are of my setup in Airtable and how I see the strings coming through in Adalo.

Also, super happy to be told the way I’m doing this is stupid and hear a suggested better way. The people on the Airtable forum gave me a long lecture on how idiotic my approach is

[oivaizmir]

I think I’ve got a solution, it’s a but ugly but doable. I’m just going to have users choose the language twice, but in a way that they think it’s a feature not a burden. Like ‘double check your acceptance’ kind of thing. That should buy me another 500 columns and now that I’m aware there is a limitation that should be more than enough.