Welcome Airtable Community.

The information in a prefilled URL cannot be saved in the form.
If default values are needed, there is a setting in a field on the Edit Form screen.
Prefill URL is used to share the link.

Hello,

My colleagues have just encountered a new issue induced by the UI, which strongly encourages the use of the new form creation solution in the "interface" section rather than as a classic "view".

• The old method generated public sharing links in this format: https://airtable.com/appyyy/shrxxx
  This format ending in shr accepts prefilling using "prefill".
• The new method generates public (or private) sharing links in this format: https://airtable.com/appyyy/pagxxx/form
  Apparently, this format does not allow the use of "prefill".

I find it regrettable under these conditions that the interface does not warn about the differences and/or impossibilities induced by this new way of creating forms. Airtable's official documentation on forms is also not up to date since it only deals with forms in "view" mode and not with forms created in "interface". A warning in this article would avoid misunderstandings: https://support.airtable.com/docs/prefilling-a-form-via-encoded-url#:~:text=Start%20by%20adding%20a%20%3F%20to,the%20correct%20field%20to%20prefill.

I have checked that pre-fill is available on the new form of interface as well.
This reference is new recently.
Building and sharing forms in Airtable 

However, the new form now saves the contents of the form as it is being filled out, so if the form is still recorded, the prefill will be overwritten. For this reason there is a Clear Form button.

I recently migrated to the new form on a trial basis, and I still don't know if this specification is good or bad.

Hi Sho,

Thanks for this response! My one remaining issue: this allows for a prefill, but does not seem to allow for the prefilled field to be hidden. I can delete the prefilled field, but not hide it.

Is it hide by URL option?

If the value contains a string that affects the URL, it may fail to be interpreted.
( space, &, etc.).

To avoid this, there is a way to encode to UTF-8.
For formula fields, Airtable can encode them with ENCODE_URL_COMPONENT("Value").

thats ninja

Hey everybody, I just wanted to add that our miniExtensions form has some more advanced prefill functionality, that goes well beyond what Airtable's form can do! So in addition to just prefilling fields and hiding them, you could also hide the prefill from the URL itself, so users don't see the prefill happening (and can therefore not mess with it!). This can be used in countless scenarios and can greatly improve the security of your prefills!

In Airtable, you can prefill a form in one of two ways:

1. Prefilling fields via the URL. This can be used for fields that you’d like to BOTH prefill and HIDE from the user’s view. This can also be used for those times when you have a dynamically-changing value that you’d like to prefill differently for each user. To learn more about prefilling a form in Airtable, see this Airtable support article.
   
   However, note that Airtable does not allow prefilled fields to be LOCKED, meaning that a user can always override a prefilled field (even if it’s hidden). If you need a prefilled field to be locked, then you can always use Fillout’s advanced Airtable forms for that.
    
2. Prefilling fields by setting defaults for the fields. Note that the defaults for the fields will remain the same for all users. They can not be dynamic. And again, these fields cannot be locked to prevent the user from overriding the default value. (To lock default fields, you could turn to Fillout.)

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