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Hi everyone,

I’m trying to set up an inspection workflow for electrical equipment on construction sites using Airtable as the main database.

Each construction site has several inventory items assigned to it through a junction table.

For every inspection visit, a technician should be able to:

  1. Start a new inspection report linked to one site.
  2. See all inventory items connected to that site automatically listed in a form.
  3. Record for each item: condition (OK / Defective / Needs repair), comment, and photo.
  4. Submit once → this should create:
    • one “Inspection Report” record, and
    • multiple “Inspection Entry” records (one per item).
  5. After submission, a PDF report should be automatically generated and attached to Airtable.

 

I’m looking for suggestions on which tools or integration methods could handle:

  • dynamic data loading from Airtable (linked items per site)
  • creating multiple related records from one form submission
  • automated PDF generation
  • mobile-friendly use for on-site inspections

 

 

Any recommendations or examples would be greatly appreciated!

Hmm, the biggest problem you’re going to face is the bit about updating all the inventory items linked to the site

Airtable forms don’t support this functionality and so you’d have to use something like Fillout.com to handle this.  This works, but would be really clunky.  For example, the technician wouldn’t see all the items linked to the site they were inspecting, instead they’d have a linked field where the available options would be the items linked to the site they’ve selected.  The record creation here would be very clunky and tedious as well with a lot of wait time in between

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I’d suggest you look into using an Interface for this instead, really.  Would need to play around with the Record Review layout I reckon, but the nice bit about this is that we’d be able to set an automation to automatically create one record per Item for that Site and automatically link it to the new Inspection record your tech created, so they wouldn’t have to do all that manually

Because it’s in the Interface keying in data will be really smooth too

For the automated PDF generation, you’ve got a bunch of options, check out DocsAutomator for that, their free plan has access to automated PDF generation so you can try it out

Another popular one is DocuMint, but the automating bit requires a paid plan unfortunately


@k88k 

  1. As mentioned above, your best bet for doing all of this with a form is to use Fillout’s advanced forms for Airtable because it lets you update existing Airtable records with a form, it lets you create & edit linked records with a form, and it lets you create custom PDF files from a form submission.

    Fillout is 100% free, and it also offers hundreds of other features that Airtable’s native forms don’t offer, including the ability to display Airtable lookup fields on forms, 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, and much more.

    I show how to use a few of the advanced features of Fillout on these 2 Airtable podcast episodes:
  1. Alternatively, you can also do all of this by paying for your users to become editors of your Airtable interfaces, and giving them access to your Airtable interfaces.

    Then, if you need to generate PDF files from your Airtable interfaces, here are a few popular solutions for generating documents from Airtable:

Hope this helps!

If you’d like to hire the best Airtable consultant to help you with this or anything Airtable-related, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consultant — ScottWorld