I am trying to use a shared form to get our client’s current Mailing Address for stipend scholarship checks. They can get multiple checks over time so we want present their last Mailing Address and have them accept it with no changes or override with a new address.. My approach was to create a shared form where I can prefill the previous Mailing Address. It would be blank the first time or would show the last value if they had one stored where they can override it or just hit submit to accept what defaulted in the form.
Because it is a shared form, anything submitted would be a new record. I was going to date stamp the new one and use it to update the master record. The issue I am having is I cannot prefill the Client ID (the key) into the form as read only (or at all) even when the prefilled link came from a record that had the key, the new record only has the data they submitted. I can't find a way to grab the unique identifiers to match what comes back from the form. Appreciate any ideas (as long as not too technical 
). Thank you very much!
The best way to solve this problem is to use Fillout’s advanced forms for Airtable.
Fillout is 100% free, and it offers hundreds of features that Airtable’s native forms don’t offer, including the ability to update Airtable records using a form.
Fillout will give you a unique link for each contact, and you just give that link to the contact and they can update their own Airtable record.
Fillout also offers hundreds of other features that Airtable’s native forms don’t offer, such as the ability to display Airtable lookup fields on forms, perform math or other live calculations on your forms, accept payments on forms, collect signatures on a form, create multi-page forms with conditional paths, create new linked records on a 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 create an eSignature approval process with PDF file creation.
- Using Fillout to create an order entry form with line items.
Hope this helps! If you’d like to hire the best Airtable consultant to help you with anything Airtable-related, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consultant — ScottWorld
Hey
I would follow
Feel free to reach out if you need any help setting this up. I’d be happy to show you around.
Mike, Consultant @ Automatic Nation
Yeah we can’t do read only fields with Airtable forms I’m afraid. The next best thing is to hide the Client ID field and so it’d look like this:
And here’s the submitted data
It works by prefilling a ‘Client ID’ field in the form that’s hidden via the URL, and here’s how the form actually looks without the field hidden:
The main caveat with this is that if a user messes with the link they can unhide it and modify the value, not sure how much of an issue this is for your use case though
And here’s how the prefilled link looks: https://airtable.com/apprta66SECDgTlZW/pag4RB4c1ajwbDelq/form?prefill_Client%20ID=3&hide_Client%20ID=true&prefill_Email=%40test.com
The automation then looks for a record in the ‘People’ table with that Client ID and updates the email and links it accordingly
And I’ve set it up here for you to check out
I sent a lot of detail earlier and I was able to solve most of the issues. I believe I will need to combine the form record with the existing record. Also, I figured out my syntax error for the hide option - it worked! And I am assuming it won’t bring in, even hidden, the linked values which is fine since I will need to combine the form and existing record. I wanted to thank you for your help!
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