Creating a user base but preventing from creating duplicant contacts

​@Thibzim 

There is no way to prevent duplicates BEFORE submitting a form unless you use Fillout’s advanced forms for Airtable.

If you sign up for Fillout’s Business Plan (or Enterprise Plan), you can prevent anybody from submitting a duplicate record in Airtable, based on any fields that you set.

So, for example, you can prevent a duplicate contact in Airtable if the email address already exists in Airtable.

However, if you want to stick with Airtable’s native forms, then your only option is to check for duplicates AFTER the form is submitted, and you would need to delete or merge the duplicates afterwards.

You can do this manually with Airtable’s DeDupe extension. Or to automatically merge records, you can try creating an automation with Airtable’s automations or Make’s advanced automations.

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

Thanks Scott ! It’s all clear 

This is a bit of a hacky workaround but you could always quarantine the form submission data and then have your automation check it against your true contact table to decide whether to import it (new contact) or ignore/add to existing record (depending on your use case). That wouldn’t provide feedback for the submitter (this contact already exists, can’t submit) but all the manual work you’d do is occasionally clearing out the submissions table. 

Hi Thibzm

A simple way to block duplicate emails is to use a formula field that checks if the email already exists. You can then show a warning message in the interface.

Want a fully automated way to stop duplicates completely? Let’s chat—I can guide you through it!

Hey ​@Thibzim!

Providing some further info on ​@ScottWorld’s answer: Even if you are using Fillout’s free plan forms, you would be able to achieve this as long as you connect the form submissions to Airtable via Make.com rather than using Fillout’s direct integration. 

By using make.com you will be able to search records with the exact email before actually creating it. If a record is found, you’ll either skip it or update it. If it is not found, you’ll create it.

If you are using Airtable native forms, still achieve this but you’d need a dirty workaround of which I am not a big fan. You could have a new table for “Form submissions” as soon as the submission goes through an automation would get triggered which would search the record on your original table based on the “Email” field. If a record is found matching the Email with the Email from the Form Submission record, then you would not push it.

Feel free to reach out if you’d like to take a look at it together. I’d be happy to help out!

Mike, Consultant @ Automatic Nation