Proofing Version Questions

Here’s how you can do it for 100% free — without paying for each partner to have an editor license.

You can use Fillout’s advanced forms for Airtable, which will let your partners update an Airtable record directly from a form.

You can place your attachment field onto the form, and your partners can upload new versions directly into the attachment field. Every new attachment that they upload will show up as a new version on your end.

However, there is a catch — Airtable’s new “versioning” feature is not supported by the Airtable API, so when your partners go to the form, they are going to see ALL the versions in the attachment field. They won’t see only the newest version.

So you would need to give your partners very specific instructions to leave all the old versions alone (i.e. don’t delete the old versions), and just ADD THE NEW VERSIONS into the attachment field.

I show a little bit on how to create an update form in this Airtable podcast episode:

• Using Fillout to update an existing Airtable record & create an eSignature approval process with PDF file creation.

Not only is Fillout 100% free, but it also offers hundreds of features that Airtable’s native forms don’t offer, including the ability create custom PDF files from a form submission, accept payments on forms, pre-fetch dynamic data from an Airtable record, customize the style and branding of your form, customize a theme for your form, display Airtable lookup fields on forms, create new linked records on a form, add a login page to your form, and much more.

I also show a few more tricks on this Airtable podcast episode:

• 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

Most native features are designed for Airtable users. And all edits require a paid account. So if Partners are submitting, that’s an edit, unless you’re using something like fillout to make the edits without them logging into the system. But that can handle minor edits, and is not a replacement for Full Airtable experience.

I do have experience building custom frontends that are simply too time-consuming or impossible in regular frontends like noloco or softr or bubble. 

Here’s one of the tools I built: https://seq-dia.opstwo.co/

It uses Airtable as a backend. I know it doesn’t directly address your particular use case, but it goes to show the complexity of builds possible on top of Airtable with custom tools. In this case, I used Fillout’s Zite tool. And it took about 10 hours to build.

Yes, to build upon what ​@VikasVimal was saying above, if you want your partners to have a full “interface-like app experience”, you would need to create a customer portal for them.

Although, one thing I should mention is that you can invite them into your interface as read-only users (which is free), and then give them a link to update the record in Fillout.

But if you want them to be able to view AND edit records within a full “interface-like app experience”, then you could use Airtable’s portals, which lets you add editors at a reduced cost.

However, this reduced cost is still very expensive, and there is a minimum of 15 users. So you might want to turn to a 3rd-party portal, which are less expensive than Airtable’s portals.

The most popular 3rd-party portals that are currently available for Airtable are:
Noloco, JetAdmin, Softr, Pory, Glide, and MiniExtensions.

I gave an entire one-hour webinar on Noloco called Building a Client Portal on Noloco powered by Airtable.

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

​@ScottWorld 

Thanks for that awesome reply!

Fillout was the first thing I tried. You are right that if you remove the old images from the Fillout form, it does remove previous version. So you need to leave that.

The problem I ran into was that each time you submit with a new image, that new image is added as V1. Airtable (or Fillout) is not incrementing the image count as I would expect. Each new image becomes the new V1 and the older image becomes v2 and so on. As I tested, my very first image is not tagged at v7 and my most recent image is tagged as v1.

I tried testing with file names and even dragging and dropping into different orders within the form field. None of those forced an order change. A new image is now v1.

Thanks for taking the time to respond.

​@mbrinkley 

Oh wow, you’re right!

This could be a bug in Airtable or in Fillout when uploading attachments through the API (i.e. any external app).

I would definitely submit this as a bug to both support@airtable.com and to Fillout (by using the chat bubble in the lower right corner of the Fillout website).

If this is a bug on Airtable’s side, you wouldn’t be able to use ANY external apps — neither Fillout nor any of the external portals that I mentioned above.

But if this is a bug on Fillout’s side, then maybe they’ll be able to quickly fix it for you. They may be able to figure out how to upload the attachments properly so it gives the proper version numbers.

By the way, after you email Airtable, they’re going to send you an auto-reply message. Be sure to reply to that auto-reply to get to a real human.

- ScottWorld, Expert Airtable Consultant 

Yup. Fillout inserts attachments at the start of the list of attachments.
I tested with zite and was able to insert at the end of the attachment array, and that solved the issue. 

View: https://airtable.com/appypaMPYv87BQR4c/shr2h2TvnVDpLsfSW

Uploader app: https://djnvagdhwp.zite.so

Try uploading multiple versions and check the version number in the view. use different filenames to track.

My Zite link will give you more credits to play with before payment is needed.
Or, check my work and ping me if you’d like me to build something for you: vikasvimal.com

​@VikasVimal Thanks for pinpointing this as an issue with Fillout! I just reported this to them!

- ScottWorld, Expert Airtable Consultant

I also looked into using a form to create an update record in a separate table and then have an automation version the image into the main table. But it looks like automations do not support versioning. At least, I dont think it does.

I’ve got a similar setup running and it works fine, if you could let me know what issues you faced with this I could see how I can help!

I’ve set up an example base here for you to check out, and here’s a gif of the automation adding a new version to an attachment field and both attachments being visible:

The automation’s currently set up to trigger when the checkbox field is ticked, but you’d probably have it set to when form is submitted or something, and it basically adds the new attachment to the list of existing attachments:

​@mbrinkley 

I’ve reported the bug to Fillout, so until Fillout fixes this issue on their end, your best bet would be to piece this together yourself with either Airtable’s automations or Make’s advanced automations.

You can still keep all of your partners as read-only users (so it won’t cost you any extra money), and then when it’s time for them to update a record with a new version of the attachment, you would just take them to a normal “create record” form (in either Fillout or Airtable).

Then, upon form submission, you would need to merge their “new attachment” with the array of “previously existing attachments” that already exist in Airtable.

The trick here is that the new attachment has to be the LAST attachment in the array instead of the FIRST attachment.

This is easier to do with Airtable’s automations than with Make’s automations.

In Airtable’s automations, you would just insert the old attachment field into the automation action for updating the record, then type a comma, then put in the new attachment.

In Make’s automations, you would need to learn how to use their array functions. In this Airtable podcast episode, I show how to work with Airtable arrays in Make.

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