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Hi - I am new to Airtable and am looking to create a form that can only be completed by personnel during business hours ie: 9-5pm on Weekdays. Is there a way to automate these date parameters within Airtable?


Thanks!

There is no function within AT that will use criteria to allow / disallow access to a data entry form.


You would be far better off using HTML and your code of choice to have a web page perform the logic over timing/day of week, then link to the form if the criteria are met.


You cannot restrict an Airtable form by time of day. A workaround is to have a warning that any entries entered outside of the specified time will be automatically deleted. Then automatically delete them using a scripting automation. Note that when you calculate when the record was created, you must take the timezone into account.


Hi there!

You can easily do this using miniExtensions. We've built a third-party form that offers various flexible options to get more out of Airtable, including several ways to control or disable form submissions. These include allowing users to create only one record, setting a scheduled date to disable submissions, and restricting submissions based on specific conditions.

 

The ability to restrict submissions when specific conditions are met can be used along the Save & Continue mode to verify if the submission is made within the business hours of a weekday, and mark new submissions as invalid while informing the user.

  • To validate the day, create a condition that verifies that the date field is a weekday. This can be done using the WEEKDAY(Date)function to create a formula field in Airtable. Then, add a condition that disables the form if the result of the formula field is 0 or 6.
  • To validate the hours, create a condition that verifies that the time of the date field is a business hour. This can be done using the HOUR(Date)function to create a formula field in Airtable. Then, add a condition that disables the form if the result of the formula is lesser than the hour your workday starts or greater than the hour the workday ends.

Enable the Save & Continue mode to compute the formulas before the user can submit the form. If the conditions are not fulfilled, you can show an error or a custom message to your users.

Note: each submission attempt creates a new record in Airtable, so you’ll have a trace of all invalid attempts. However, only submissions made before reaching the limit will have a verification checkbox marked, which you can use to filter your view. If you'd like to automatically remove invalid submissions after a certain time, we have a miniExtensions automation that can handle this. It can be scheduled or triggered via a script with an Airtable action.

Feel free to try out these features with a free account on miniExtensions. You're also welcome to schedule a free demo meeting with us.


One cool & easy way of doing this would be to use Fillout’s advanced forms for Airtable.

Fillout offers hundreds of features that Airtable’s native forms don’t offer, including the ability to pre-fetch dynamic data into your form by specifying an Airtable record that you want to load behind-the-scenes into Fillout.

So, in Airtable, you can create a record that has 2 formula fields that are constantly evaluating what today’s day & hour is. For example:

Here’s the formula to figure out today’s day of week:
WEEKDAY(NOW())

Here’s the formula to figure out the current hour of the day:
HOUR(NOW())

Then, all you would need to do is pre-fetch that record into your Fillout form, and disable the submit button for the form if those 2 fields don’t match the criteria that you’re looking for.

Fillout is 100% free, and it also offers hundreds of other advanced features that Airtable’s native forms don’t offer, including the ability to update Airtable records using 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, create new linked records on a form, and 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 have a budget and you’d like to hire the best Airtable consultant to help you with this or anything else that is Airtable-related, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consultant — ScottWorld


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