Pre-filled form problem

Hey ​@Celine LEmarquand,

I did not get the chance to dig deep into this yet, however it is curious to see that a different user posted this exact same issue yesterday. See this post. 

I’ll try to get back to this soon. However, if you play around with it and the issue persists you might want to reach out to support@airtable.com

Completely different matter, but would love to have you join our Airtable Hackathon! Make sure to sign up!!

Mike, Consultant @ Automatic Nation 
YouTube Channel

​@Celine LEmarquand ​@Mike_AutomaticN 

Wow, it looks like this is a current bug in Airtable’s forms.

I can’t get Airtable’s forms to prefill any linked records anymore, although I can still get it to prefill all the other fields.

Please be sure to report this as a bug to support@airtable.com, and hopefully they will fix it ASAP.

In the meantime, this is probably the best time ever to talk about the MUCH MUCH better way of creating forms for Airtable, which is to use Fillout’s advanced forms for Airtable.

Fillout is 100% free, and people have been using it for years to not only workaround Airtable’s bugs like this, but more importantly…

Fillout offers hundreds of features that Airtable’s native forms don’t offer, including 4 different ways to prefill a form — and 3 of those ways don’t even require you to create a complicated prefill URL at all!

Actually, I lied — Fillout also offers a 5th way to prefill a form, because it allows you to update Airtable records directly with a form, You would use this method if you’re trying to update an existing record in Airtable.

Fillout also offers the ability to update Airtable records using a form, create custom PDF files from a form submission, accept payments on forms, pre-fetch dynamic data from an Airtable record, customize the style and branding of your form, customize a theme for your form, display Airtable lookup fields on forms, create new linked records on a form, add a login page to your form, perform math or other live calculations on your forms, collect signatures on a form, create multi-page forms with conditional paths, connect a single form to dozens of external apps simultaneously, add CAPTCHAs to your 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 update an existing Airtable record & 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

Hm, you mention you have 4 prefilled linked records, but in the link / formula you provided there are only 3 prefills, so it makes sense that only 3 are showing up

Could you provide some screenshots of the form / table setup?  A screenshot of the Form with the 4 linked fields and the URL that’s supposed to prefill all 4 would be helpful too!

As a datapoint, prefilling the 3 linked fields with your formula works fine for me as well:

​@Celine LEmarquand ​@Mike_AutomaticN .

Oh, never mind what I said above. I figured out why my linked record prefill wasn’t working.

This isn’t a bug (at least on my end).

I didn’t realize that I had conditional filtering setup on my linked record field in the Data layer.

This was preventing my form from prefilling the linked record!

So that’s probably your issue as well.

Airtable actually offers 2 different places to filter linked record fields, so be sure to check BOTH places:

1. Filtering on the linked record field itself (in the Data layer).
2. Filtering the linked record field on the form itself (in the right margin under “Selection”).

Make sure that you don’t have any filtering. Or if you do have filtering, make sure that it allows the record that you’re trying to prefill.

- ScottWorld, Expert Airtable Consultant

Hey ​@ScottWorld, 

Thank you for you answers, I  double checked and I don’t have any filtering… (but it’s happened to me before though, so that could have happened). 

I have contacted Airtable support to check.. 

Céline

Hey ​@TheTimeSavingCo, 

Thank you so much for your base trial with my problem and sorry for my late answer (Airtable for some reason didn’t approve my first answer a few days ago?!). 

Here are some pictures of my set up: 

I don’t know if it helps but I have 3 other forms linked to this base (it’s to gather feedbacks from different stakeholders regarding the trainings we provide), and on all of theses forms I need to have a LinkedRecord to the “session” tab to see to which session it’s related to, and on all these 4 forms the problem is the same : 

the session field doesn’t show up on the form but shows up in the URL. 

Here are the links to the other 3 forms:

• https://airtable.com/app3VaYZ9KK6HEimn/pagkYd92x4Ep7V780/form?prefill_Client=Founders%20Pledge&prefill_Session=70
• https://airtable.com/app3VaYZ9KK6HEimn/pag98g1bxHhSXB358/form?prefill_Session=70
• https://airtable.com/app3VaYZ9KK6HEimn/pagrKOxm7byBvtljJ/form?prefill_Formateur=Camille%20Rabineau&prefill_Formation=Cr%C3%A9er%20du%20collectif%20%C3%A0%20distance&prefill_Client=Founders%20Pledge&prefill_Session=70

Thank you so much for your time!!

Have a nice day, 

Céline

Thanks for the links and screenshots!  Hmm everything looks fine

For ‘Formulaire d'évaluation financeur’, could you try doing a prefill with the record ID of the ‘70’ record to see if that works?  Could you duplicate your base with no records in it and DM me a link to it please?  I’d like to poke at the base itself to see what I can figure out!

Of course, here is the link to my duplicate base (no records), but on read only though (will that work?)  : https://airtable.com/appA0PmTQkziEe5jB/shryZ3iRPPkmrHQaV

And for Formulaire d’évaluation financeur, this is the link when I’m trying to fill with the record ID 70 : https://airtable.com/app3VaYZ9KK6HEimn/pag98g1bxHhSXB358/form?prefill_Session+=+70
 

Thank you so much !

Céline :)

Update, we fixed this by using RECORD_ID instead!  And so the final link looked something like:

https://airtable.com/app3VaYZ9KK6HEimn/pag98g1bxHhSXB358/form?prefill_Session=recQGJ6xX6DgoxTdZ

Some experimenting seemed to point at the culprit being the linked table’s primary field being an autonumber field as swapping that out to a single line text field allowed the prefill to work

However, there was another base where the prefills worked fine with the same setup, so not really sure what’s going on.  Worth mentioning though in case someone else faces a similar issue and is confused!