Prefill a field and lock the content

I am by no means an expert in using AI inside Airtable, but I view myself as expert in Airtable and AI independently.  There might be a perfectly acceptable answer, but here is how I would tackle it in my head at the moment. Use AI to generate the content you need into a cell. Then use a formula in a different cell to concatenate the fixed cells with your AI cell. That way you merge the two. I’d be happy to learn a better way.

Airtable doesn’t really support this workflow that well and my first instinct is to point you to Fillout Forms to integrate with Airtable. It provides a lot more flexibility and power than Airtable’s native form component while maintaining the data in AT in real time. 

That said, I did see a post recently here which included this Loom video doing basically what you’re asking. It requires a writing a pretty lengthy and specific formula to generate the appropriate pre-filled form URL to share, and leverages another formula field (which are inherently not editable) to displayed the locked information.

Also, just my hobby horse, but “AI”ing everything means you don’t ever actually understand the tools you’re working with. 

Hey ​@MagPage (Kara), 

I’ve created a work around let me know if this works out. 

check out the following link. You can check out the automation as well that will help you to understand. 
Demo Link

Hey ​@MagPage, you’ll want to right click on the corresponding field on the base and click on Edit field permissions. -see image below.
 

 

You’ll then want to select “Nobody” on the dropdown!

Hope this helps.

Mike, Consultant @ Automatic Nation

​@MagPage 

Are you talking about locking the prefilled field on the form itself? Or locking the field after the data has arrived in Airtable?

If you want to lock the prefilled field on the form itself, you can either:

1. Use Airtable’s forms with a custom URL that HIDES the prefilled field, but it can’t be locked. In other words, the user could still change the prefill value within the URL itself.
2. You can BOTH hide AND lock pre-filled fields with Fillout’s advanced forms for Airtable, because you don’t need a custom URL to pre-fill fields with Fillout, so the hidden fields can’t be accessed by the user.

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

Thanks ScottWorld. Bummer. That’s not really what I wanted. My use case is this:
I use AT for advertisers and for sending them their final orders for approval. I do not want them to be able to change the price in my pre-filled form. This is where the locking capability would be very useful. 

I don’t want to hide it b/c they need to know the rates they are paying. I fill the rate in from the data table and it pre-fills for them when I share the final link. 

Thanks for reaching out though. Hopefully AT can resolve it soon. 

Ah okay, that makes sense — you can actually use Fillout for that, because Fillout can display lookup fields on your form that can’t be edited!

In fact, you don’t even need to create a lookup field in Airtable… Fillout will let you choose a linked record field, and then you can display in read-only format any field that you want from the linked record table.

Fillout can even do math on the forms, too!

Check out my 2 demos of Fillout at the links below — the first video is more relevant to your needs.

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

In cases like this where  I want users to be able to see data, and I don't want to use a third party tool, I prefill the info into a separate text field for display purposes only. In the helper text for the field in the form, I tell the user that the values are for their info only and tell them to not change it. People could edit the value, but usually don't. Once the form is submitted, the value in the field is ignored, but it could be compared to a lookup value to and a flag raised if the user actually did edit it. It's not perfect, but does keep everything within Airtable itself.