Has anyone connected a standard html form to Airtable yet

Welcome back to the Airtable community!

I doubt that many people have connected a vanilla html form to Airtable. Instead, people

• embed the native Airtable form in their websites, or
• use 3rd party form services that provide easy integration with Airtable.

Trying to connect your own html form to Airtable without a 3rd party service would involve using the REST API, and a huge amount of back-end work that isn’t very cost effective compared to the alternatives.

There are a few good examples on CodePen!

One of the issues with the REST API is you need to include your Airtable API key with every request. The CodePen example requires including your API key in client-side code. However, you should never include your Airtable API key in client-side code because then anyone could copy your API key and have access to all of your bases.

It is possible to hide the API key on the server side, but then you need to have server-side code, which is more complicated to setup. It’s do-able, but so much more work than 3rd party form services that it’s rarely worth the effort.

That’s the goal of the API gateway I mentioned in the other thread:

As an app developer, you could expose only the API tokens you’re willing to share, and you can do the back-end processing with a separate Javascript file that runs independently with no need for the client to access it.

Just in case anyone finds this thread in 2024+ (SERP still leads here), you can (now) achieve this through Airtable's Webhooks. Just set up a webhook automation that creates a record and have your form POST to it with the relevant data.