Form to edit data

There’s a long running discussion about this already, here: Form to edit data

In your example case, why not have a table just for ‘incoming documents’ with fields for docs and who uploaded them, then relate that to your other tables?

I hope this feature will become a reality soon :heart:

Roger, we should move over to the other thread.

That’s a good workaround, but I’ll prefer not to create more tables than I have to.

Right now, forms allow you to add a new record. However, I wish for the possibility of editing a record via a form as well. It would probably require the first question to select the record in question using the primary field, then filling or editing the fields that are available as questions.

I think this would be useful for many situations where you need users to interact with your base but you don’t want to provide actual base access. For example, if a table on your base consists of staff members and you need them to upload a relevant document. However, the base contains sensitive information about other staff and you don’t want it to be seen by everyone.

Hate to say “me too,” but “Me too!”

Have membership information/updates and a library. Would be great to be able to use forms to update data.

Bump for this feature request. It’s table stakes for many projects. Icing on the cake would be a field that lets you auto-generate a link to the pre-filled form. That way, I could direct each member of my club to edit their own record as needed.

I’m trying a work-around on that, creating a prefilled url, but I still have not figured out how to do it when I have spaces in my table names. It might be a cool feature to have a “table name” that is restricted to no spaces or special characters and an “display name” that is otherwise shown.

I will add another request for this feature. It is taking the means to share a read-only view to the next level of allowing users who have the view to edit the data within that view only.
A use case is for team collaboration. A project manager can setup a calendar with tasks assigned to each member. The members can see their tasks, comment, and edit the duration/completion of task. However, each user does not need to see all the tables and data for the project as a whole.

Hi all, Peter from Airtable here. I just want to point you to a new support article of ours that outlines how to configure forms to edit data through Zapier. The integration works quite well, but does require a paid Zapier account (at $20/month), because it is a multi-step Zap.

We realize this is quite a steep price tag for those who aren’t already paying for Zapier. Likewise, we hear loud and clear how important more granular permissions are for all of you. Thank you so much for sharing the details of your use cases, and I promise that we’ll continue to explore further improvements here.

Disappointing that we should have to step outside Airtable and use a (paid or not) third-party app to achieve this.

I work at a school & all the contact information from parents could be managed indefinitely with editable forms. One time forms make it impossible and rather useless for any similar use case.

I really need this feature to be implemented. Google Forms has the ability for individuals to edite their previously submitted forms.

Any update from the AirTable team on where we are on this feature?

Hi Peter. Would it be an option to fix the granular permission issue with a couple of hacks?
a) add a new type of field, called “record owner” (the person who created the record)
b) add the option to share views to a particular email in edit mode (not only view)

In this way, an administrator could create a separate filtered view for every user of the database, filtering only the records belonging to that user. Then, it would share it with them in view & edit mode.

Update forms would indeed be an awesome way to integrate Airtable into existing workflows.

It’s not feasible to provide full table access to all of the people we need to update data in it, and we’re lacking self-serve access to a validating front end that can (a) pre-populate fields with lookup data similar to the create record form, and (b) sanity check the fields that are submitted.

We can sort of work around this with Typeform and Zapier, but gross doesn’t even begin to describe this process.

Thanks for considering!

Hey beloved Airtable team!

While you study how to implement a flexible and sophisticated granular permissions feature for editing tables, views and so on it would be very useful a simpler solution for editing a unique record through a filtered link to edit that single record just from the web.

Just create the form and generate a link from a concrete record to edit it. Simple, isn’t it? I love Airtable but this feature is absolutely a must. Thanks for being there!

Jessica, I have this exact same problem too. I’m trying to figure out a way for existing users to fill out a second form that will then amend their details from the first form that they filled out.

If anyone knows a way around this I’d be keen to know!

Basic use case here… updating an address or phone number.

Whether employees, sales contacts or whatever, I would love for people to be able to just submit the updated address or phone number.

As it is, I have new employees fill out a handy airtable form with all sorts of stuff when they are hired, but after that, they literally have to email me to update their info.

Booooo!

Hello,

I would like the ability to customize the “expanded record view” so it what it shows looks like:

1. Invoices
2. Purchase Orders
3. Task Lists
4. Requisition Forms
5. Order Forms
6. Business Cards
7. eMails
8. Checks
9. You name it…

And… you hit print and get beautiful Invoices, Purchase Orders, Task Lists…

Thanks,

Would be great to be able to be able to scan a barcode of equipment and have the form auto populate with the details and the user simple check out or check with minimal updates. As opposed to risking them checking in/out the wrong item because of fingers and touch screens.

Also being able to set multiple forms to start and continue data entry and simplify what could otherwise be a very lengthy form.

There’s lots of applications where this feature would be very useful.

New to this platform - it sounds like you can’t use a form to add data to an existing row and if not, is there a way to automatically link the new data to an existing row? thanks -

Hi Doug

You can use expanded record view to edit existing data - which is essentially a form. However, I expect you are talking about web forms?

If this is the case then, in common with many similar platforms, you can’t provide record editing through forms published online. However it’s possible to capture new records into a table this way - which can link to an existing record (but this would mean the person entering the data would have to see the look up table value which may be a security issue). If this is all you need then you can have the additional fields in a seperate table with a join to the main one.

But, if you want to update information in the main table then you need a way to take data from the table to which the form enters it and then move it to the table you want to update. Unfortunately, there are no tools in Airtable to do this - but it can be done with Zapier (which I find an essential partner to Airtable - it really brings it alive).

The technique would be to have a Zap which triggers when a new record is added and then uses a Find step to locate the record to update - and then either create a new record if none is found or updates the found record. You can build some quite complex logic into a Zap (including Javascript) to deal with many use cases.

The downside is that Zaps with Airtable are not (currently) Instant and so you have to wait until they run (5 or 15 minutes depending upon your Zapier account) and you need a paid Zapier account as they need to be multi step Zaps.

Hopefully, soon, Airtable will implement Webhooks (and Instant Zaps) which will enable Zaps to run immediately - this would hugely improve the platforms capabilities in my opinion!

I’ve been thinking about this some more - form based entry is absolutely vital for many applications and needs to include a better way of entering data into sub-tables (for example line items for a sales receipt).

At the moment, it’s possible to enter data in a linked field to a sub table which is already connected to another parent record. This should be impossible as clearly a line item can only ‘belong’ to one invoice, for example. If you accidentally link to an existing record in this way, Airtable allows this entry despite the fact that the link is created as one to many. This MUST be fixed soon as it leads to incorrect data.

I’d also like to see an option for a table / view that records can only be added using expanded view - and for there to be a little more flexibility on the part of the creator of the base to determine the fields available in the expanded view (for example you may not want some people to be able to look at the hidden fields.

A final point for now, it would be nice to have a button in grid views to add a new record (through Expanded view preferably) - scrolling to the bottom of a table is not very user friendly.

Bumping this feature request as well.
This would enable us to greatly improve our workflows.

Any chance you can give more specific instructions on how to update records with zap? I can see that its possible but can’t seem to figure it out in zap.

There’s this guide:

But it’s complex, requires a Zapier subscription, and doesn’t pre-fill existing data on the form – all of which combine to make it not workable for me :frowning:

New to airtable and loving it, but now realizing that a form can’t be used to update a record is almost a deal killer for me!

In my case, I need a group of music teachers to be able to add, update or delete their lesson day and times so a HS band director can keep tabs on her program. The Band Director and I are the only ones that should have access to the base, and the teachers are interested only as long as they don’t need to do anything more than interact with a simple form.

too bad.