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Greetings Airtable community!


I’d like to ask for your help —> I need to be able to share a single Airtable record (e.g. form response) with people who are not Airtable users or collaborators, and to have it password protected. Up to now, I’ve done the following to share this information:



  1. Receive an online form response,

  2. Turn it into a PDF manually,

  3. Encrypt the PDF manually,

  4. Email it to my team member manually, and

  5. Send a separate email manually with the password to open the encrypted PDF.


This is cumbersome and it is not scalable. Instead of doing all that, I would like your help so that I can:



  1. Share an individual Airtable record via email using a link to that specific record,

  2. Do not give access to the entire base through the link, only to the specific record,

  3. Password protect the individual record so the link isn’t public to the whole world (if it needed to be, this could be a single password for all the applications… having a unique URL + this kind of password has enough security for my needs)

  4. Finally, if possible, can I limit the duration of time that the link works. For example, the link is only active when it’s within 2 weeks of their scheduled appointment.


Thank you very much for your input! Airtable is very powerful, and I am learning how to use it in better and better ways.


-ML

Hey ML, if you’ve got a Pro account, the easiest way for you to deal with this would be to create a password protected view that only contains the row and specific fields you want to share


For example, this view has the password “testme” applied to it.



If you don’t have a Pro account, I’m not entirely sure how to achieve what you’re looking for and hope that someone else has a suggestion!

Hi ML,


so Airtable doesn’t offer the option to share a single record externally via a link. You can only use the link to a record if the recipient has an account, which is not the case for you.


What you can share though are views which can also be password-protected. You would then create a new view for every new record, which works but is not the most elegant solution 🙂 (and please be aware of a limit of 1000 views per base).


There is an app from miniExtensions which could solve your problem : Share Links for Record but I have no experience with it personally.


In both cases, you don’t have the option to time-restrict the link availability.


Hope that helps a bit!

Rupert

Hey ML, if you’ve got a Pro account, the easiest way for you to deal with this would be to create a password protected view that only contains the row and specific fields you want to share


For example, this view has the password “testme” applied to it.



If you don’t have a Pro account, I’m not entirely sure how to achieve what you’re looking for and hope that someone else has a suggestion!


Thank you - I have Pro, but I think manually creating 60+ Views a month would take away the benefits of the automations.

Hi ML,


so Airtable doesn’t offer the option to share a single record externally via a link. You can only use the link to a record if the recipient has an account, which is not the case for you.


What you can share though are views which can also be password-protected. You would then create a new view for every new record, which works but is not the most elegant solution 🙂 (and please be aware of a limit of 1000 views per base).


There is an app from miniExtensions which could solve your problem : Share Links for Record but I have no experience with it personally.


In both cases, you don’t have the option to time-restrict the link availability.


Hope that helps a bit!

Rupert


I thought I posted this reply already, but I don’t see it:


The miniExtensions option looks good, and I’ve reached out to them to learn more. Thanks!


Another option is to use the CloudConvert service.


Here is what the workflow could look like using scripting:



  1. Someone submits a form. Formula fields automatically take the form responses and generate html for a document.

  2. An automation script reads the html from the formula field, generates a password, converts the html to a password protected pdf file using the PDF Converter from CloudConvert, and then uploads the pdf file to an attachment field and also saves the password to the record.

  3. Another automation sends the two emails: one with the pdf attachment, and a second one with the password.


No manual steps at all.


You could also build a similar workflow without scripting–use an automation service like Zapier or Make/Integromat instead.

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