Form to edit data

Thank you so much @Bill.French!

I think Airportal is a pretty cool name! It is like Airport-al :grinning:

Re: the platform limits, yes we are implementing a caching layer to avoid any issues with the rate limits for popular portals.

Yeah, it’s not bad, but the marketing guy in me always leans toward two syllables whenever possible.

It would be very useful to add an Airtable form to Edit existing records where the editable fields could be restricted much like the hide/unhide fields in the form that allows adding records.

Is Airtable placing this in a future release?

I agree with the posts here as well. This is an essential feature to make use of Airtable.

I am in the process of setting up a Project Management system via Airtable and, I have to say, I spend more time here, scrolling through pages and pages of what seem to be obvious need feature requests, that it worries me. The idea was that this would be a quicker set-up than building in MySQL from scratch, at least, that is exactly how Airtable are marketing their product. The issue I have is that, in general, it seems that there is little to no interest in the community or its needs.

Was this issue ever solved? It certainly does not appear so, along with so many others.

I guess that my questions are these:

1. Did this ever get implemented?
2. Do feature requests generally get implemented?

If the answer to either of these is no, then this is a deal-breaker for me and, sadly, I will abandon this project and go back to MySQL. Not necessarily for this one feature, but for the general lack of forward motion that I see everywhere in these forums.

No, that’s not a solution to my use case:

We invest in start ups. When we first discover a company we input roughly 30 fields of data. If we there is an opportunity to invest we will input another 100 fields. If we decide to invest there are another 50 fields.

I need to be able to send out 3 forms for different life stages of the record.

LOL. I just read my post from six months ago and realized Airportal has been renamed to a two-syllable word. Called it!

We made a tool that allows you to edit records using Airtable Forms. We solved most pain points in some existing solutions:

1. Form fields are pre-populated with the existing data.
2. Records are updated instantly after form submission.
3. Form requires minimal setup (no need to match multiple tables/fields/select options)
4. Supports limiting linked record selection to a view.
   ^This last one can only be made possible by using Airtable’s native form.

Here’s a video for more details:

I’ve been helping a user that would benefit from a multi-row editable form as well. The user would like to share a selection of his data for review from judges, but those judges shouldn’t see each others’ responses. In other words, a judge would be editing multiple rows of data, but shouldn’t see all available data.

Many thanks for sharing my requirement Zollie - yes, there are significant overlaps. As a comment, I’d add that there’s a significant difference between using a form process (where you need to identify the record to be updated) and a view process (where you browse records and update one or more fields). The advantage of views IMO is that (a) Airtable already supports them, including the ability to hide certain fields and (in beta) lock the edit permission for others (so you can display them in an expanded record but not update them) and (b) they permit browsing and very rapid data updating. For example, if I could edit records from a Kanban view, a judge (to use my use case) could scroll through records, rapidly assigning a data value from a selection by dragging each record to the appropriate column.

[obvious edit] - to do this, you’d need to (a) be able edit from a view and [b] be able to share that view without granting access to any other views or tables.

Hey guys, check up my page www.update-airtable.io
or Youtube video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffT_xcfnxxI

On this page I have described how you can easily overcome the missing feature with Update Forms.
Second I have also described how to create a Custom Portal for Airtable so that even non Airtable users are able to see a Base, View and even Update, Delete and Create records.

Worked on this solution for at least couple of weeks. Really curious about your feedback :slightly_smiling_face:

I’m trying to help setting up an animal rescue database. Where we keep track of vet records, dates, health, foster, etc. We want our foster’s to be able to easily go to a form, select their animal, and make edits to the data presented. Dates, health status, etc. without having to look at a complex spreadsheet with all the other records for other fosters. Sure, we could create views - but that also then gets messy.

Having a form where you can select an active record, then edit that record in a form view would be LIFE changing for the rescue.

For anyone still looking for a solution to this problem, I would love to learn more about what you need. I’m a software developer and am planning on building a solution for this. Please feel free to reply here or DM me on Twitter at @CurtisFonger.

Would appreciate to hear more about your solution. Its crazy Airtable does not feature this

I recently discovered https://stacker.app/. I would love to learn if that solves your use case.

Hi Curtis,

Thanks! My needs are very simple: I have a records of tasks in a specific table. One of the fields of each record is “task complete” checkbox. I want the option of a simple form that any person can update if he completed the task.

Stacker requires that one of the fields would be an email address ( which I dont have nor need).
If you hae any other ideas would be happy to hear.

Thanks and have a great weekend ahead,

Michael

Does this solve your use case?

Not for me. Typically we have only a small handful of people who are managing airtable, while I have over 100 people who will be submitting information via a form. Then we want to have peer review sessions and have the authors who submitted the form to go back and revise their submissions.

So in this way if airtable had a way to give people edit permissions to a submission in a base, by creating account or even anonymous write access (like an open google doc) that would make this possible. I’m not too worried about people messing things up.

Another example is that I’m using Airtable for a ‘members directory’. I want each person to be able to update and edit their own profile information. These people do not need (and I don’t want them to have) full access to any of my bases or manage content, just a small bit of information and for them to be the owners and stewards of that information.

So to summarize succinctly for you

When I have asked many people to submit a form, and those people who submitted the form are also responsible for editing/updating/managing their submission, I want airtable to provide a way to give submitters sovereignty over their submission so that I don’t have to make trivial edits on anyone’s behalf and so I can focus on more important stuff like managing data structures, information workflows, integrations, publishing, compliance etc.

Yes - we need this too!

Same need as many – we use a table to track startups through our vetting and due diligence process. We have different events that gather data in big chunks, after which we curate all the data in a single Google Doc template via Zapier. It would be far more efficient for us to be able use forms to add to the record rather than using an expanded record. And setting up a Zapier process is way too kludgy. Please add this functionality.

Hi @Daniel_Swid @Jesseca_Ryan @Derek_Footer! I now have a working implementation that should enable this. Please reach out at curtis@whaleform.com if you would like to try it out.

MINIEXTENSIONS HAS THIS FEATURE.
My Airtable functionality has improved 10 fold since using these extensions.
100% RECOMMEND FOR SMALL BUSINESS USE CASES

It looks like Miniextensions does this exactly how I’d like it - it’s just quite expensive. In Australian dollars it’s over $50 a month. Given I only use it a handful of times a month I’m not sure it’s better than my kludgy Zapier based solution to this issue, which is significantly cheaper and allows me to do a bunch of other things with Zapier.

If it was ~$10 a month I’d probably use it.

It always amazes me that in a climate of deep and precise analytics, vendors cannot build solutions based on micro-payments. We can know with perfect knowledge how many times any process is executed and how many milliseconds in resources the process consumed. We can even predict web services demand within 99.5% accuracy.

But tie that activity to shape a discrete and precise pricing model to vastly capture a large share of users?

Nah - we’re too lazy to go the trouble of eliminating all pricing objections from a vast ocean of potential buyers who just pass us by.

Mini Extensions, Zapier, Airtable, Integromat - why aren’t you creating value propositions that are irresistible to every buyer?

Oren, did you find a solution to this problem? It’s very similar to my own.