Hello @Oscar_Mastroberti!

Currently our forms don’t keep track of who a user is once they’ve been authenticated—so I don’t believe this is currently possible.

One way you could have a user easily identify themselves in a form is by creating a Collaborator field that a user could then search for their name in. Expanding on that, you could potentially create a URL for each collaborator if you’d want to have that Collaborator’s name prefilling in that form.

Let me know if I can help provide any more information, and if this helped answer your question please mark it as the solution .

Thanks @Rose_K for your quick response. May I follow up with some questions?

1. For your suggestion on the collaborator field to work, do I need to add them as uses in my base?


2. Is there a way to link to a record automatically, if an email field is populated and then matched with an email field from that linked record?

Thanks

Hey @Oscar_Mastroberti!

Great questions! I’ll answer using the same question numbers you used, for clarity:

1. If you wanted to take advantage of the collaborator field the users would need to be added to your base or workspace or base collaborators.
   
   
   
   • If you are working with a lot of folks who aren’t collaborators on your base you could create a table, or just a field, using people’s names and then create a linked record field (either self linking or to another table, depending on your workflow) so those existing names would be searchable in your form.
   
   
   
   


2. When using forms you can prefill a field by updating the URL. So you could create a url for each individual’s record id— which would then effectively prefill that linked record input in that form. This support article should lay down the foundation of how you’d go about this, but let me know if you run into any problems along the way!

Personally, I think the best way to handle both of these requirements is to use Fillout’s advanced forms for Airtable.

With Fillout, you can create a login page for your form, which will give you these options:

1. You can restrict the logins by SSO.
2. You can restrict the logins by email domain.
3. You can restrict the logins by password.
4. You can restrict logins based on a pre-approved list of email addresses that you have stored in your Airtable base.
5. You can verify & confirm that the user is typing in a valid email address.
6. You can limit form entries to one entry per person.

And then, here’s the most important part for your needs:

After the user logs in using your login page, that will let Fillout know who the user is and what the user’s email address is.

Then, you can use this email information to automatically prefill other fields on your form based on who logged into your form, and you can even use this email information to do other advanced tricks with Fillout.

For example, you could use Fillout’s filtering features to filter your linked record fields to only show the user the linked records that they are allowed to see, because those linked records are linked to their email address.

And Fillout offers lots of other advanced features for Airtable as well, such as the ability to:

• Update existing Airtable records using a form.
• Display Airtable lookup fields & Airtable attachment fields on forms.
• Create brand new linked records on a form, or edit existing linked records.
• Create PDF documents from form submissions, and then attach those PDF files to the Airtable record.

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