Form View - Unique URL for Records for Others to Fill In Fields

John,

You can send a unique URL for the record but the recipient needs to have editing permission. I’m not an expert on Airtable’s permissions, so I’d advise you to read about them first. You can grab the URL by “control-clicking” on the record name and selecting “Copy record URL.” Clicking on that link will open up the record in the context of the view from which you copied it. You can expose the URL for each record in a formula field with the formula ‘https://airtable.com/tbleID/viwID/’ & RECORD_ID(), where tbleID and viwID are the actual table and view IDs.

You can automate the process even further if you need to. Let’s say you’ve filled out some of the fields on three new records in your table. You can create a view that filters on incomplete records, which creates a “task list” for your co-worker(s). A one-step Zap from Zapier can send an email, text or Slack message to your coworker that alerts them there’s a new task in the list. You could also embed the “task list” view on a website.

Again, this requires that the coworker can edit an existing record. If you coworker doesn’t have editing permissions, you can do something like this with a more complex Zap, but how that would work depends on your circumstances.

JB

John, thanks so much for your suggestions – I’ll give them a try. -John

Our miniExtensions form allows you to edit existing records. You can automatically generate a unique link for each record in your table, which would open it up in the form. You can then share this link with the user so they complete the data. You get to decide if you show the data you have already filled out, or if you want to let them edit that data if necessary.

1. If your users already have Airtable accounts (and they are designated as editors or creators), then you can simply create a formula field that equals the URL of the page that you want to take them to inside of Airtable to edit any record.
   
   Take a look at the URL at the top of your screen for any record detail page that you are looking at. You will see “recXXXXXXXXXXX” near the end of the URL.
   
   That is the variable part of the URL that changes to represent each record, so within your URL formula, you would replace that “recXXXXXXXXXXX” section with the function RECORD_ID() to represent each record’s unique ID.
    
2. However, if your users are external customers who don’t have access to your Airtable system — or if your users have read-only accounts — then you would need to use Fillout’s advanced forms for Airtable.
   
   Fillout will also give you a unique URL for each record, and anybody with that URL is allowed to edit that Airtable record using a form.
   
   If necessary, you can even add extra security restrictions by adding a login page to your form.
   
   Fillout is 100% free, and it offers hundreds of features that Airtable’s native forms don’t offer, including the ability to update Airtable records using a form, create custom PDF files from a form submission, accept payments on forms, pre-fetch dynamic data from an Airtable record, display Airtable lookup fields on forms, create new linked records on a form, add a login page to your form, perform math or other live calculations on your forms, collect signatures on a form, create multi-page forms with conditional paths, connect a single form to dozens of external apps simultaneously, add CAPTCHAs to your form, and much more.
   
   I show how to use a few of the advanced features of Fillout on these 2 Airtable podcast episodes:
   
   - Using Fillout to update an existing Airtable record, create an eSignature approval process with PDF file creation.
   - Using Fillout to create an order entry form with line items.

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