Well, if Airtable let you prefill a hidden field, you’d be all set: Prefill the hidden field, and then reflect its contents in a second, formula field. But since you can’t prefill a hidden field, maybe reorder the fields to put the prefillable one last, use the field description (which precedes the field) to indicate clearly the form stops prior to that field, and once again mirror the field’s contents using a formula field in a much more visible place in the form?

I don’t think this would work either because they don’t allow you to add formulated fields to a form either (or did I miss an update somewhere?)

Damn, shows you how often I use forms. (I suppose that restriction made sense at the time…)

I’ve come up with several other ways of providing you with a non-editable question text… none of which will work because of limitations on forms. Sigh.

Ya, that’s a bummer.

This would definitely be a place for improvement, but I think they have bigger fish to fry in the feature requests department.

Thanks for your ideas. I went with a big warning sign and some more backoffice processing to cope with eventual changes. Read-only labels would really be a big up for designing smart forms though!

Ack, I’ve just come up against this one too. I want clients to complete a form that has their name pre-filled, which is in fact a linked field to their full record. I got very excited when I saw that simply pre-filling their name does all of the linking automatically in the background, while only displaying their name on the form…

<< BUT >>

All they have to do is click the little cross next to their name, to clear the field, and all of a sudden they have the option to “Add Client” and they get a drop down list of ALL my clients!! Chances of them actually doing this are slim, but I can’t have that potential confidentiality hole in my workflow.

Having read-only fields would be one thing but, really, why oh why can’t we pre-fill hidden fields?! It’s gotta be a fairly straightforward thing (I do it with MailChimp forms all the time).

Is there a Feature request thread associated with this?

`` In my case, i have a link to another record that i need to have i prefilled. I have a regulation not to allow the other users who use the form to be able to view the information from the other record.

I saw a feature request thread here.

h t t p s://community.airtable.com/t/readonly-fields-or-labels/18881

I hope Airtable will seriously consider this

I would also like this feature, but I think an even better solution would be to pass parameters and have Airtable use those parameters to lookup a key or hash value, which is actually passed to the form. This way, people would have a much harder time simply changing the URL tokens with guesses.

I’m interested in this feature for exactly the reason you mentioned! Did you come up with a workaround for this at all?

Sadly not! None of my hopes and dreams for Airtable to really grow into its true potential seem to materialise. Different priorities I guess, but still… :man_shrugging:t2:

Thanks! I was thinking of adding an additional single line text field to have clients fill in this info on their own, then I can go through and take their free-form entry and select the appropriate option in my linked record field. It’s a bit of extra work, but my volume for this use case isn’t super high so it’s probably manageable. Just noting my idea in case that would be helpful to you!

Hi AirTable! I’m switching to Wordpress because this feature is missing.

With all due respect, that makes no sense. Wordpress isn’t even the same type of application/tool as Airtable. And you’re dumping Airtable without even asking if there’s another way to achieve what you want, perhaps with the help of a third-party form tool like Jotform or On2Air: Forms . I just don’t get it.

Doesn’t matter whether WordPress is the same type of tool or not as long as it meets the project requirements. The topic of this thread is the lack of AirTable support for read-only fields. Not sure how adding a forms interface will address that since I already have plenty of write-enabled fields. What is good about AirTable is that I can present cell phone users with rows of an existing spreadsheet, and that they can fill in cells that are missing data. What is not good is that there is no way to prevent them from misclicking and accidentally overwriting data that’s already there. I remain open to suggestions.

The topic is “How can I make a form field read-only?” (emphasis mine). It’s specifically talking about forms, which is why I recommended an alternate forms interface. On2Air: Forms can give you much greater control over a form interface, including displaying read-only data in a form, and using a form to edit an existing record, neither of which are possible with Airtable’s native forms. If you’re looking to present Airtable data to users, and want to control what data those users can/cannot edit, it’s worth a look.

Adding on to this discussion of read-only fields, it would also be great to be able to use read-only Lookup fields in Forms. For example, in a feature survey using a Linked Record field to select (or pre-fill) a survey, it would be very useful to be able to display a read-only Attachment field via a Lookup field to show the user an image of the given feature.

I have found a few clunky workarounds to this in particular use cases (e.g., adding a “Verify you’re a human” checkbox to mark a certain status or kickoff a workflow, or using Zapier to parse, enrich, and route Form responses after the fact), but this makes things unnecessarily difficult. Instead, simply be able to select read-only fields and being able to provide default values (or Formula-generated values) for such would be utterly amazing.

Hi everyone!

At miniExtensions, we built a third-party form specifically designed to integrate with Airtable. Our form supports prefilling read-only fields and dynamically displaying lookup fields.

• To prefill read-only fields, simply turn on the Read-only and Allow URL Prefills toggles in the field settings.

• A field with those properties can be prefilled using the URL parameter, like in the example below: 

  • ?prefill_Readonly=Information%20for%20you 

Any lookup field you add will be populated depending on the selected linked record field: