I want to create a straightforward bot for Slack that can search through my Airtable database. The functionality should be pretty basic - when someone types a search term in Slack, the bot should look for that term in column A of my Airtable and then return whatever value is stored in column B for that row.
I’m also thinking it might work well as a slash command. Something like /lookup [search_term] where the bot would take the search term, find it in my Airtable data, and respond with the matching result.
I don’t need anything fancy with natural language processing or complex queries right now. Just a simple search and return function would be perfect for what I’m trying to build.
Has anyone done something similar before? I’d really appreciate any guidance on how to get started with this kind of integration between Slack and Airtable.
I solved this exact problem with Google Apps Script instead of regular hosting. It automatically handles the server stuff and connects perfectly with Slack and Airtable APIs. You can set up webhook endpoints right in Apps Script and deploy them as web apps. For lookups, I found partial matching with toLowerCase() works way better than exact matches - users always have slight variations in their search terms. One thing that bit me: handling multiple rows that match the search term. Decide upfront if you want the first match or all matches. Definitely go with slash commands for user experience. Just make sure you respond fast with an immediate ack, then follow up with the actual data so you don’t hit timeout issues.
oh nice! I did the same thing with python and flask. super easy setup - you just need to parse the slack requests correctly. and yeah, error handling is crucial or things get messy fast if you dont validate properly!
Built something similar with Node.js and Slack Bolt about six months ago. Airtable’s API is pretty straightforward once you’ve got your base ID and API key set up. I used the filterByFormula parameter to search for exact matches in my target column - worked great for what I needed. The tricky part was authentication. Make sure you store tokens securely and set up proper OAuth scopes for your Slack app. Heads up - Airtable has rate limits, so you might want basic caching if you expect heavy usage. My bot responds in a second or two for most queries, and users are happy with that speed.