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Having a bit of trouble and would love some insight.


I have 2 tables. The first table is a Work Order Table and the second is an Activity log table. In Table 1 I have a button configured to upon click open the form view on Table 2. I have a referenced field in Table 2 to reference the record the button was clicked on table 1.


I am struggling with the button url on a table 1 record that will open the form on table 2 and prefill the referenced linked fields.


Here is what I have so far:


Welcome to the community, @JaredKinchen!

In the past, your best solution for this would be to use Kuovonne’s Prefilled Forms extension to prefill your forms.

However, nowadays, 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:

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

Welcome to the community, @JaredKinchen!


I would recommend using @kuovonne’s Prefilled Forms extension. It doesn’t support hidden fields in forms, but as long as you don’t need hidden fields, it should work well for you:












I have already tried his extension and the URL isn’t populating the results for the linked records.

Welcome to the community, @JaredKinchen!


I would recommend using @kuovonne’s Prefilled Forms extension. It doesn’t support hidden fields in forms, but as long as you don’t need hidden fields, it should work well for you:












Again, I am using a button in one table to open up and populate the form view of another table. So the linked fields in the second table need to be prefilled with the related data in the first table. I am not sending the form to someone with pre-filled information in the form from the table that the form is in.

Again, I am using a button in one table to open up and populate the form view of another table. So the linked fields in the second table need to be prefilled with the related data in the first table. I am not sending the form to someone with pre-filled information in the form from the table that the form is in.


@ScottWorld just tried that extension again. It gave me the same formula I am using. Still not working. So not sure which part is not right.

@ScottWorld just tried that extension again. It gave me the same formula I am using. Still not working. So not sure which part is not right.

 

Prefilling a form with linked records works fine for me.

  • I would check the spelling of your field names and make sure you’re putting in a valid primary field value for the prefill value.
  • Also make sure that it is a unique primary field value in the linked table.
  • Make sure the prefilled value is URL encoded.
  • If none of the above works, remember that you can always prefill with the Airtable Record ID instead of the primary field name.

However, nowadays, it is much easier to use Fillout to prefill forms and prefill linked records.

As I mentioned in my previous post above, Fillout lets you update Airtable records directly from a form with no prefilling necessary at all!

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.)

This video of mine might be of help — it doesn’t show prefills, but it shows how to update a record with Fillout:

- ScottWorld, Expert Airtable Consultant

 

You can prefill a linked record with either a primary field value, or with Airtable’s internal record ID.


If you are prefilling with a primary field value, keep in mind the following:



  • The primary field value must be 100% unique in its original table. If multiple records have the same primary field value, the form will not know which one you want and will not prefill the form.

  • The primary field value cannot have special characters, such as commas and quotes. The form will try to split the value at the comma and thus will not match properly.

  • If you are prefilling with multiple linked records, they must be comma separated. If you are prefilling from a lookup field, you may think that there are commas there, but there aren’t.

  • You cannot create a new linked record from a form.


When possible, I recommend prefilling linked records using Airtable’s internal record IDs. I find it is much more reliable.

You can prefill a linked record with either a primary field value, or with Airtable’s internal record ID.


If you are prefilling with a primary field value, keep in mind the following:



  • The primary field value must be 100% unique in its original table. If multiple records have the same primary field value, the form will not know which one you want and will not prefill the form.

  • The primary field value cannot have special characters, such as commas and quotes. The form will try to split the value at the comma and thus will not match properly.

  • If you are prefilling with multiple linked records, they must be comma separated. If you are prefilling from a lookup field, you may think that there are commas there, but there aren’t.

  • You cannot create a new linked record from a form.


When possible, I recommend prefilling linked records using Airtable’s internal record IDs. I find it is much more reliable.


Thank you, I did get it working, and yes, I do prefer to do all of this airtable without the use of forms. My issue is that when I have a linked record field and go through the process to add a record from that linked field, it goes to the default view (I think its the first view listed) of the table for that linked record, regardless of the view I assigned it to look at.


This is problematic and not sure why if I assign the linked field a view to look at why the new record being created won’t look at that view.

Sadly it is not possible to pre-fill linked records in new interface forms 

I've been wracking my brain as to why it worked before, but not now.  And the interface forms appear to be the culprit.

Hi there,

Hannes from the miniExtensions team here! Our form offers this functionality right out the box! You'd simply create a formula that links to the form in the second table and appends the required prefill. This can be set up in a matter of minutes and works like a charm! You can prefill by record ID or using the primary field. When using the primary field name you'd just need to be sure to encode any special characters using the ENCODE_URL_COMPONENT function.

Our form also offers static prefills, which can be super useful if you need to prefill every form submission with the same value (say, setting a status as "New", for example). Those static prefills don't show up in the URL and are therefore not overrideable by your users (if you hide the field on the form or make the field visible, but read only)! There's a lot of functionality to discover here.

You can try it all out with a free account now! 🙂 

 

 

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