Issue with Hyperlink to an Airtable form with Prefilled fields

​@JZ-Mousketeer 

The problem is that you still need to “URL encode” all the field values & field names in your original formula that you posted at the top of your message — because your original formula will not result in a valid URL.

You need to wrap each individual field name and each individual field value with the ENCODE_URL_COMPONENT() function.

For more help with this, I would recommend using ​@kuovonne’s free Prefilled Forms extension to help construct your valid prefill URL. This extension makes it very easy to create a valid prefill link in Airtable.

After you have a valid URL, then you can check to see if the automation works as expected.

However, I should mention that prefilled links are not the recommended way of doing this anymore.

The easier & quicker & more bulletproof way of doing this is to use Fillout’s advanced forms for Airtable, which is 100% free.

• If you’re trying to update existing records in Airtable, Fillout gives you the built-in ability to update an existing Airtable record with a form — with no prefill links required and no automations required.

• If you’re trying to add new records into Airtable, Fillout gives you 4 other ways to prefill a form — for a grand total of 5 different ways to prefill a form. And best of all, no prefilled links are required for 4 of these 5 methods. If you do want to use prefilled links with Fillout, they make it easier to setup & configure your prefilled link.

Fillout also offers hundreds of other advanced features that Airtable’s native forms don’t offer, including the ability to create custom PDF files from a form submission, accept payments on forms, pre-fetch dynamic data from an Airtable record, customize the style and branding of your form, customize a theme for your form, display Airtable lookup fields on forms, create new linked records on a form, add a login page to your form, perform math or other live calculations on your forms, collect signatures on a form, create multi-page forms with conditional paths, connect a single form to dozens of external apps simultaneously, add CAPTCHAs to your form, and much more.

I show how to use a few of the advanced features of Fillout on these 2 Airtable podcast episodes:

• Using Fillout to update an existing Airtable record & create an eSignature approval process with PDF file creation.
• Using Fillout to create an order entry form with line items.

Hope this helps!

- ScottWorld, Expert Airtable Consultant

+1 for using Kuovonne’s prefilled form extension, saves a whole bunch of time

I thought maybe it had to do with spaces, but I’ve tested it with underscore, no spaces, and even found something saying using a + or %20 between words, but none of those produced just the hyperlink, they all showed the full string like above. Here’s an example of another one that I tried removing the spaces in the field name and you can see in the nest section a regular hyperlink that works just fine. 

Yeah it does have to do with spaces, and in your example if you remove the spaces in ‘Mid State Refrigeration that would have worked too

You could technically get away with just running a ‘SUBSTITUTE’ and replacing all spaces with a +, but if you ever introduced something like a ‘&‘ or ‘,’ or something in your field names / prefill values it’d go wonky again because those have specific meanings in a URL, and so that’s why we use ENCODE_URL_COMPONENT to fix that

Try this:

'https://airtable.com/appi09WiT6MFsy9zo/pagYdHzqnzsTRVhmn/form?' &
'prefill_Efficiency+Arizona+Applicant+Name=' & 
ENCODE_URL_COMPONENT({Applicant}) &
'&prefill_Your+Email+Address=' &
ENCODE_URL_COMPONENT({Applicant Email}) &
'&prefill_Street+Address=' &
ENCODE_URL_COMPONENT({Full Address}) &
'&prefill_Project+Number+Form+Submission=' &
ENCODE_URL_COMPONENT({Project #}) &
'&hide_Project Number+Form+Submission=true'