interfaces & ussers

The solution noted here might help you 

I have something similar set up for an interpretation ticketing and time tracking system, and it does leverage Fillout (Zite) to get the job done economically.

I have two paid seats on the system (myself as the builder and the interp admin) and everyone else is on view only seats. For those view only seats I created an interface for each interpreter with multiple pages, and share only each interpreter’s interface with them (which are of course filtered to the specific user). That handles all the viewing. Then for creating/editing, I have several Fillout forms for creating tickets, creating log events, and editing tickets as necessary. Each interface contains links to those forms so the view only users just need to keep a bookmark of their interface pages and they can access the relevant forms. 

One thing to deeply consider in your environment is proper compartmentalization and compliance for HIPAA (being a nursing home). Airtable only claims HIPAA compliance at the Enterprise level, and last I checked (it was awhile ago) Fillout had HIPAA on a roadmap but was more focused on European data security requirements. 

Thank you very much for the responses…

In parallel, while I was waiting for replies, I confirmed that Fillout can indeed work. I started by creating an app, and within minutes I had it up and running. Now I’ll check the cost, but I was surprised by how easy it was. It connects to the database without any issues.

That said, I still have mixed feelings… If the solution is already defined within the Interface, why doesn’t Airtable enable that capability directly?

Anyway, nothing more to add.
Thanks again, team!

​@nre 

If all of your users have Airtable accounts, then you can do this natively within Airtable’s interfaces. You can filter any interface by the “current user” or the “current user’s email address”.

However, it sounds like you’ve already got it setup with Fillout's advanced forms for Airtable, which is one of my favorite tools for Airtable.

You can also do this with Zite's AI portal builder as well. Zite was created by the same team that created Fillout.

Hope this helps!

If you have a budget and you’d like to hire the best Airtable consultant to help you with this or anything else that is Airtable-related, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consultant — ScottWorld

Unfortunately, I can’t get the staff to have access only to creating, editing, and viewing their own tasks.

Hm, may I know what issues you had with filtering by the current user?  This assumes you’ve set an assignee for each task, and then they’d update / create task data via forms, right?

And here are the docs:

https://support.airtable.com/docs/interface-designer-permissions?highlight=interface#filtering-data-by-current-user

I have implemented user level access in multiple projects and it can be done very easily. You have two options:

1. Use Airtable’s native “User” field and link every task to a user. Then create a separate interface for every user and filter the records by “User” for every team member in their respective interface.
2. If you don’t want to use Airtable’s native “User” field, create your own User table and link each task to a record in your User table. And do the same as above in interfaces.

Either ways, every team member gets to see the tasks only belonging to them. And if you want them to create tasks also only for themselves, native “User” field will be helpful there as well as Airtable form will capture the “User” who created the task and then you build an automation to assign the task also to the same User who created the task.

No. Users do not have accounts in Airtable.
Maybe I didn’t explain that clearly.

The users are external people who use creation forms for this purpose; there is no issue there.
However, at least two groups of them should also be able to modify records… and for that I need to find a solution—the most cost-effective one, at least until the whole system is fully working.

I built an app as I mentioned. It works.
But I am also completing my own HTML web, running it locally, designing it to my needs, and I believe I’ll be able to launch the query and modification URLs created with Fillout.

Do you think this is a good approach?
What I don’t know is the potential cost.

We would be talking about around 1,000 modification/creation actions per month.

In total there will be around 30 members creating entries through forms.

They are stable, with low turnover, but they perform personalized care work as gerocaregivers. They record information so that others, in healthcare supervision, can make decisions.

These records are tasks that are continuously updated in a Kanban format. Since the entries are often made very quickly by voice, there is a possibility that they may need to be modified afterward.

That is where I would like to give them editing capabilities.

The healthcare control staff, using those previous records as a reference, act accordingly—moving the workflow forward, documenting, commenting, closing tasks, and so on.

Broadly speaking, this is the situation I am trying to solve. I understand that by creating new Airtable users, even shared ones, I could build interfaces that would handle this scenario, but I believe Fillout can achieve the same outcome at a lower cost.

Does that make sense?

Thank you for your responses.

​@nre 

That is correct. You could handle this with Airtable interfaces or by using Fillout, but Fillout would be less expensive (i.e. probably free for your needs).

One advantage of Airtable is that it lets your users see multiple records at a time, whereas Fillout only lets them view/edit one record at a time.

- ScottWorld, .Expert Airtable Consultant

Yeah, creating as Airtable users with view permissions could be useful, but 30+ users to manage (presumably not on an Enterprise workspace) feels like a lot to me. 

From your description, my mind goes to a workflow scheme of Fillout Forms for record creation, gets logged in Airtable and an autogenerated email is sent to the submitter summarizing the record along with a link to an edit form created in Fillout. Then they can make edits through the form if necessary (or just leave it be), while the healthcare control staff are working directly in Airtable 

Well, I’m going to work with Fillout, web HTML, and interfaces… I’m sure everything will turn out fine!!!
Thanks for everything.

Hm, it sounds like you’ve got everything sorted, but it’s worth noting that read-only users on an Interface would be free, and so you can do an Interface filtered to only show tasks assigned to the current user (as defined by who submitted the form probably), and then have a button that would open a form they can submit to edit the data, and it’d all be free

Using Fillout for the forms would be the simplest for editing data and their free tier goes up to 1k submissions per month.  If you need more you could either pay or use Airtable forms for it, and Airtable has a guide for that here:

https://support.airtable.com/docs/use-case-update-records-via-a-form

Wow!!!!

That hadn’t occurred to me… very good.

I’m definitely going to explore it as well.

I’m wondering how to “pass” the ‘id’ to the external form, but I’m sure there’s a solution.

Fantastic suggestion. Thank you.

​@nre 

I show how to do this on this Airtable podcast episode:

• Using Fillout to update an existing Airtable record & create an eSignature approval process with PDF file creation.

On that episode, I demonstrate how to:

• update Airtable records using a form
• create custom PDF files from a form submission
• collect signatures on a form
• and much more

Also, you can click on the links above for Fillout’s written instructions on these topics.

Hope this helps!

If you have a budget and you’d like to hire the best Airtable consultant to help you with this or anything else that is Airtable-related, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consultant — ScottWorld