Form Attachment Issue when tracking who submits a response

I am not experiencing the same problem that you are experiencing with your attachment fields.

My read-only users are all able to upload attachments through forms, even when requiring a log-in to the form.

However, I would probably recommend using Fillout’s advanced forms for Airtable, which allows anybody that you would like to upload attachments to your Airtable base. 

You can create a login page for your form by using Fillout, which will also give you these optional features:

1. You can restrict the logins by SSO.
2. You can restrict the logins by email domain.
3. You can restrict the logins by password.
4. You can restrict logins based on a pre-approved list of email addresses that you have stored in your Airtable base.
5. You can verify & confirm that the user is typing in a valid email address.
6. You can limit form entries to one entry per person.

After the user logs in using your login page, that will let Fillout know who the user is and what the user’s email address is.

You can use this information to automatically prefill other fields on your form based on who logged into your form, and you can even use this information to do other advanced tricks with Fillout.

For example, you could use Fillout’s advanced filtering features to filter your linked record fields to only show the user the linked records that they are allowed to see.

And Fillout offers lots of other advanced features for Airtable as well, such as the ability to:

• Update existing Airtable records using a form
• Display Airtable lookup fields & Airtable attachment fields on forms
• Create new linked records on a form
• Create PDF documents from form submissions, and then attach those PDF files to the Airtable record

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 ​@Enjay,

I’m curious. Why would you say that the issue is related to “when you enable the “See who submitted a response””?

I don’t think that would be the case. If possible, please provide some additional context!

Mike, Consultant @ Automatic Nation

As a datapoint, I just tried the following and it worked fine

1. Interface form with ‘See who submitted’ turned on
2. Form shared to ‘Anyone on the web’
3. Account that didn’t have access to the base was able to submit the form with an attachment

Just tried a couple more tests. 

It’s not specifically the see who submitted option. it's just when a person who is logged in who does not have an editor license is not able to submit an attachment. 

So like you mentioned, ​@TheTimeSavingCo  having a completely anonymous and public form allows users to submit forms with an attachment, as long as the person submitting the form is not logged in to Airtable. If they are logged in even with the form completely public, it does not allow submitting an attachment with the form. 

Hm, I’m confused, sorry.  The test I ran had the account logged in

​@Enjay 

No, that is not normal behavior.

All external forms always accept attachments at all times, so if you’re experiencing that problem, then you will need to contact support@airtable.com to have them investigate.

Also, you may want to double-check to make sure that you’re not using a “form interface page”, which shows up in the left margin of the interfaces. “Form interface pages” are only usable for editors and above.

Make sure you’re using the Forms builder, using the “Forms” button in the toolbar at the top of the screen.

- ScottWorld, Expert Airtable Consultant

I had my user do it in an incognito window not logged in, works fine. 

Then I had that same user log into Airtable in their incognito window and attempt to do it again, got the invalid permissions alert. 

Yeah, I'm using the form builder.

When they click the attachment field, they get the window to attach a file, but once they click upload, they get a browser warning saying invalid permissions. This happens with all of my users that are viewer license level. Anyone that has editor can add attachments with no issues. Here is the browser alert they get. Confirmed no browser extensions are running as well, 

I had a couple of my users test two ways using an Incognito window. 

First one was opening the form in an incognito window and using it without logging in. Uploading an attachment works with no issues. 

Second one was opening the form in an incognito but logging into Airtable in the incognito window first. Uploading an attachment no longer works. 

Confirmed I am using the forms builder. 

I don't know if this makes a difference, but this is on the enterprise licensing. All of my users that have editor license are able to upload attachments in the form with no issues. All of the users that have viewer licenses are unable to upload attachments in forms. As ​@ScottWorld mentioned I think I will need to get Airtable support involved as this does seem to be unintended behavior. 

Yeah, that’s weird. Sounds like a bug. Be sure to report it to support@airtable.com, and then let us know what they say!

- ScottWorld, Expert Airtable Consultant

First one was opening the form in an incognito window and using it without logging in. Uploading an attachment works with no issues.

Hm if you have ‘See who submitted a response’ toggled on users can’t access the form unless they’re logged in, so this shouldn’t be possible?  What shows up in the ‘Created by’ for this submission? 

Yeah, this was after it was brought to my attention that it could be not related to the see who submits a response. 

So I turned that off to take that out of the equation and turned the form 100% public. Which is when I had a few of my users do both of the methods mentioned. 

I had just assumed it was because of the see who submits a response, but its only if the user is logged into Airtable. For some reason the attachment portion of a form is reading permissions level if they are logged in, but for not logged in users everything works fine. 

​@TheTimeSavingCo ​@ScottWorld 

I submitted to support and figured I'd post here what their response was just in case you were curious or anyone else comes across this bizarre behavior and thinks its unintended. 

My submission was this:
When users are logged in that only have a viewer seat type, they are unable to upload attachments using forms. This seems like an unintended behavior as if you make the form completely public and they use the form not logged in they can upload attachments to the form without issue.

This was the response from support.
I'm happy to help with this, and I really appreciate you bringing it to our attention.

At the moment, this is the expected behavior for Viewer seat users when accessing forms while logged into Airtable. I completely understand how this can feel counterintuitive—especially if you're aiming for a smoother, more flexible submission experience.

For now, the best workaround is to have those users submit the form while logged out of Airtable, or by using a private/incognito browser window. I know that’s not ideal, but it can help bypass the restrictions tied to Viewer access during form submissions. 

Thank you for outlining your needs so clearly. I agree that having more control and granularity around form behavior for different seat types—especially Viewers—would be incredibly useful. I've gone ahead and logged this as a feature request with our product team, and they’ll be actively exploring ways to improve this experience in the future.

​@Enjay 

What!? OMG, that is crazy!

Wow, thank you so much for posting their response here!

That is nuts. Makes no sense at all.

Wow, now it seems like it’s even more important than ever to just switch your forms over to Fillout’s advanced forms for Airtable. You gain hundreds of more features, AND you can create a login page that remembers your users across multiple visits and will allow them to upload attachments. And you can even restrict the login page to only your only domain, to only a list of emails from Airtable, SSO logins, etc.

Fillout also lets people edit Airtable records from a form as well. So it’s a great way to workaround the issue of read-only users not being able to edit records in Airtable.

- ScottWorld, Expert Airtable Consultant

Yeah, ran into this too seems like a permissions quirk tied to the seat type. One workaround that helped us was using a Power Automate flow to collect responses ribbon in bitlife and attachments separately while still tracking user identity. Not perfect, but it gets the job done.

​@Enjay That’s helpful, thanks!

​@Enjay This comes a few days late, but I did want to chime in and say that if you’re still trying to track who submitted the item (and assuming you haven’t done this already), you can at least add a required “User” field to the form (titled “Submitted by” or something similar) and set the default answer to “Current user”. Logged out users should still be able to manually select their user account, users with editor permissions who are logged in are saved the click, and you’re tracking who submitted the item.