Toggleable edit mode for Expanded Records

​@JYuen 

Yeah, that’s a little bit tricky because Airtable doesn’t have any built-in controls for that.

Here are 2 different ways of working around this Airtable limitation:

Workaround #1 — Requires Business or Enterprise Plan:

If you’re on the business or enterprise plan, you can use conditional visibility to workaround this issue.

First, you would create 2 different groups of fields on your record detail view.

Each group would have the SAME EXACT FIELDS WITHIN THEM, but you would set one group to “View Only” and the other group to “Editable”.

Then, you would add a single-select field to the top of the page, which has a dropdown menu that lets the user toggle between “Lock” or “Unlock”.

When the user chooses “Lock”, you would display the group that is view-only. When the user chooses “Unlock”, you would display the group that is editable.

There are a few downsides to this approach:

• It requires a Business Plan or higher.
• Once you “unlock” a record, everybody who is currently looking at that record will see it as unlocked.
• Whenever you make a field change to one of the groups, you’ll need to remember to make that same field change to the other group.

Workaround #2 — Use Fillout:

Fillout is 100% free, and it lets you edit Airtable records directly from a form.

So what you can do on your record detail page in Airtable is display all of your record’s fields as “view only”.

Then, you would give your users a button (or a link) to click on that would open that record in Fillout.

Then, they can edit that record in Fillout, and when they hit the “submit” button, the record will be automatically updated in Airtable.

You can view the instructions on Fillout’s website here.

I also show how to use a few of the advanced features of Fillout on these 2 Airtable podcast episodes. The first link below shows me demonstrating how to use this “edit Airtable records directly from a form” feature.

• 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 ​@ScottWorld 

Big fan, and really appreciate you jumping in here.

Workaround #1 looks like it'll do the trick.
 

Thanks again!

​@JYuen Thanks so much! 😀 And you’re welcome! 😀

Coming in a few days late, but offering another suggestion for anyone else with this issue looking to avoid adding a field in your data for purely UI reasons: make the record detail in your current, main interface view-only. Duplicate the page, then duplicate the record detail layout so you have a new record detail page specific to this version of the page—and then make this one editable. Go back to your original interface and its view-only record detail page and add a button somewhere (at the top of the record detail page, at the top of the interface, wherever it’ll make the most sense for you + your team) that links to your new editable version. 

Whenever you need to make updates to the visible fields, you can make them to the view-only version and then just replicate this process (deleting the old page + it’s corresponding record detail page each time).

Et voilà! Another way to set up an extra guardrail to avoid accidental edits.

I’m also a very, very big advocate of getting granular when it comes to permission settings and the view-only/editable options in interfaces to avoid hiccups like this. User groups/teams can be really helpful here if you have the bandwidth to manage them. If there are teams who shouldn’t ever have editing privileges over a certain data point, you can implement user groups and configure that field’s specific permission settings accordingly. If there are folks that don’t need to see or edit a particular piece of data, make that field conditional so they just never see it in interfaces (can they get to it in the data layer if they really try? sure, but this addresses those accidental edits or mis-pasted values). Are there pieces of information that are so rarely changed that it’s not a big deal to make people go to the data layer to make the edit? Keep that field view-only in both versions of the interface pages. I’ve had a base set up with a field where only 2-3 out of ~50 people were allowed to make edits anywhere, regardless of how many interfaces and syncs were pulling from the data. 

There might also be something to setting up an email or Slack digest that catalogs changes made to specific fields you want to keep a close eye on, and sending that to a small group of folks who like to keep an eye on things. 

Always happy to chat solutions. ☺️