In general, the maximum length of a url is a little over 2,000 characters. Different browsers can implement slightly different limits. If the total length of the resulting url is close to 2,000 characters, you might have a problem. If it is well under, you should be okay. If I recall correctly, there used to be issues with trying to prefill rich text fields, but that may have changed (it’s not something the app controls).

Thanks @kuovonne

Much appreciate your reply!

I must admit, I thought there was a way of pre-filling the form by passing a recordID through the URL (of a record from the same table which has the values you want to pre-fill) . I’m sure I saw one of @Gareth_Pronovost excellent videos describing how to do that. But I can’t find the video now and couldn’t get that to work anyway!

You can prefill a linked record field by passing the record id of the record to link, instead of the primary field value. You can get the record ID of a record using the formula RECORD_ID(). However, I recommend limiting this to only internal forms. If you use this technique in an externally facing form, you risk exposing all the the other records in your table to the public.

Hi ​@kuovonne 

First of all, thank you for creating this extension, it’s such a valuable and necessary tool! I’ve come to rely on it heavily since implementing extensive pre-filled forms for several clients.

That said, I’m running into some significant challenges and would greatly appreciate your help:

Issue

• I frequently encounter the “Sorry, an error occurred” page without any clear reason.

• When I reload the page as instructed, all field mappings are lost. This has caused me to lose my work multiple times, which is very frustrating.

Enhancement requests

1. Auto-mapping fields – Mapping each field manually is very time-consuming. Would it be possible to auto-populate matches when the field names are the same in both tables (similar to how Docupilot and Airtable already handle this)?

2. Editing existing forms – Each time I edit a form, I need to completely re-map the pre-filled fields. Is there any way to retain existing mappings? Currently, I leave the page open to switch between the mapping screen and the formula page, but this times out after a while, and I’m constantly worried about accidentally closing the screen.

I truly appreciate this extension and the value it adds. I hope these improvements can be considered, and I’m happy to provide further details or collaborate on solutions if helpful.

Hi ​@Marcia_CreativeSystems_Aus,

I’m not sure if ​@kuovonne is still updating her prefilled extension anymore, but I wanted to let you know that prefilling Airtable’s forms is no longer the preferred way of doing this anymore, thanks to Fillout.

Nowadays, the preferred way of prefilling forms is to use Fillout’s advanced forms for Airtable, which is 100% free and lets you update Airtable records directly from a form with no prefilling necessary at all!

Thats right — no prefilling necessary. :)

Even if you don’t want to update existing Airtable records, it’s much easier to prefill forms with Fillout, because they give a variety of different ways of prefilling — including the incredible ability to dynamically pre-fetch a record from Airtable using a simple URL, which can then be used to prefill fields on your form. (No more complicated URLs to prefill an entire form.)

Even better, Fillout offers hundreds of features that Airtable’s native forms don’t offer, including the ability to create PDF files from a form submission, create new linked records with a form, display Airtable lookup fields on forms, control access to a form via SSO or email domains, perform math or other live calculations on your forms, accept payments on 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:

• Using Fillout to 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