How can I make a form field read-only?

[Tim_Bourguignon]

Hi there,

I was wondering if and how I can make a (prefilled) field in a form read-only. I am basically creating a form to answer a question. The form should be generic, but the question should change. But it should not be changed by the user themselves.

I know the field wouldn’t “really” be read only since the user could modify the query string parameter, but that would be good in my usecase to prevent unwanted changes to one of the fields.

Thanks!

[W_Vann_Hall]

Well, if Airtable let you prefill a hidden field, you’d be all set: Prefill the hidden field, and then reflect its contents in a second, formula field. But since you can’t prefill a hidden field, maybe reorder the fields to put the prefillable one last, use the field description (which precedes the field) to indicate clearly the form stops prior to that field, and once again mirror the field’s contents using a formula field in a much more visible place in the form?

[Jeremy_Oglesby]

I don’t think this would work either because they don’t allow you to add formulated fields to a form either (or did I miss an update somewhere?)

[W_Vann_Hall]

Jeremy_Oglesby:

I don’t think this would work either because they don’t allow you to add formulated fields to a form either

Damn, shows you how often I use forms. (I suppose that restriction made sense at the time…)

I’ve come up with several other ways of providing you with a non-editable question text… none of which will work because of limitations on forms. Sigh.

[Jeremy_Oglesby]

Ya, that’s a bummer.

This would definitely be a place for improvement, but I think they have bigger fish to fry in the feature requests department.

[Tim_Bourguignon]

Thanks for your ideas. I went with a big warning sign and some more backoffice processing to cope with eventual changes. Read-only labels would really be a big up for designing smart forms though!

[Giles_Croft]

Ack, I’ve just come up against this one too. I want clients to complete a form that has their name pre-filled, which is in fact a linked field to their full record. I got very excited when I saw that simply pre-filling their name does all of the linking automatically in the background, while only displaying their name on the form…

<< BUT >>

All they have to do is click the little cross next to their name, to clear the field, and all of a sudden they have the option to “Add Client” and they get a drop down list of ALL my clients!! :scream: Chances of them actually doing this are slim, but I can’t have that potential confidentiality hole in my workflow.

Having read-only fields would be one thing but, really, why oh why can’t we pre-fill hidden fields?! It’s gotta be a fairly straightforward thing (I do it with MailChimp forms all the time).

Is there a Feature request thread associated with this?

[Benjamin_Tan]

`` In my case, i have a link to another record that i need to have i prefilled. I have a regulation not to allow the other users who use the form to be able to view the information from the other record.

I saw a feature request thread here.
h t t p s://community.airtable.com/t/readonly-fields-or-labels/18881

I hope Airtable will seriously consider this

[John_Faig]

I would also like this feature, but I think an even better solution would be to pass parameters and have Airtable use those parameters to lookup a key or hash value, which is actually passed to the form. This way, people would have a much harder time simply changing the URL tokens with guesses.

[Alex_Edwards]

I’m interested in this feature for exactly the reason you mentioned! Did you come up with a workaround for this at all?