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Emily_Sermons
6 - Interface Innovator
6 - Interface Innovator

Hi Airtable Community! :wave: I’m Emily, a product manager for Airtable’s Interfaces team. I’m so excited to announce a new feature that is available today: Interface Forms!

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What are Interface forms?
Interface forms are an easy way to create new records directly in Interfaces. Using the full power of the Interface Designer layout engine, you can customize exactly what information you’d like your users to enter each time they create a new record.

How can I access Interface forms?
There are two ways to create a new form:

  1. Create a full-screen form using the new form layout. This should be available any time you create a new page in an Interface.
    image
  2. You can add forms to existing pages that include a Record List or a Record Picker. Select either of these elements and toggle “Allow users to create new records” in the properties panel. From there, you can configure your form modal.
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Who can use these forms?
Any user who has access to your Interface can access the forms you make to create new records. Stay tuned for more updates on Permissions in Interface Designer coming this fall.

Is this meant to replace Form view in the base?
Using the Form view in the base is still a great way to collect information from users who do not have an Airtable account. Interface forms are meant to be an easy way to create new records directly from an Interface.

What can I expect next?
The team is working on a lot of exciting updates to Interface Designer in the coming months, including: improvements to Interface forms, new button types, Navigation, Permissions, and more! We always love to hear what you want to see more of, and happy to answer any questions.

Interface Designer Contest
I also hope to see many of you make use of this new feature in the Interface Designer Contest. Because this feature is being rolled out a bit later than anticipated, I’m excited to share that we will be extending the Interface Designer Contest deadline by 2 weeks - you will now have until August 12 to get in your submissions. I’ll be one of the judges and can’t wait to see what you all create! More details about the contest can be found here.

This update is available now. If you aren’t seeing these changes reflected, please try clearing your cache.

50 Comments
kuovonne
18 - Pluto
18 - Pluto

Thank you so much for these new features. And, thank you as well for monitoring this thread and replying to people’s posts.

No matter how many features you release, people will always want more, and people will always suggest changes. I am personally hoping for a way to easily create record with default values set at runtime based on the current record (e.g. new linked records, dates that default to today/now, user fields that default to the current user, etc.).

For now, at first glance, can I make one minor suggestion? In the modal for a new record, can you add a cancel button next to the “create” button? It took me a while to find the “x” in the top right corner to close the modal.

Joe_Hewes
7 - App Architect
7 - App Architect

Having a tinker with it now and yes the ability to pre-fill data is pretty crucial to most use cases, otherwise you can’t link the new record created with the record you are viewing. An option that would be great is if record pickers that are already linked to parent records could automatically prefill the criteria set for the record picker.

Karlstens
11 - Venus
11 - Venus

My initial feedback from usage - sorry for the incoming essay! :scroll:

Table View Forms have the ability to add dependent fields. Here is an example of why - Due to Airtable Table and Field limitations (and as a side note, keen to hear how others might work this same problem) if I have a “Country” field, and then for example, a field for associated “States/Territories” when a country like Australia is selected, I then need another field called “Regions” when New Zealand is selected - and then a trend is realised - I need to add a field per country option… argh! :sob:

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But by persevering and adding a field per country to assign the “sub-region” - This at least allows the country associated States/Territories and Regions to be added as dependent fields in a View Form - but as the additional fields require scale with the amount of countries added to the list - I consider the Airtable Elephant In The Room. It truly is an awful limitation, even if the View Form works as per the below screenshot.

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As Airtable View Forms allows Dependent Field configuration - these enable a Form user to select a country from a list, and then the next field displays the associated regions/states/territories associated with the previous selection. From that users perspective, they don’t see the infinity fields required to support this easy-to-use View Form.

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Now that we’re up to speed on that - in testing the above scenario in Interface Forms, unfortunately the Dependent Field mechanism that’s found in a View Form is missing - meaning that an Interface Form is lacking what I would consider the most critical feature.

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As per above, the only option for an Interface Form to tie in with a table that has a View Form with dependent fields, is to list every single field representing each sub-region… oh dear… Not good.

All of this really boils down to, after years of users requesting, Airtable not having the ability to create state based field lookup dependencies. I should have one “Country” Field, and one “Sub-region” Field, and all the data for both those fields living in a “Location” table, and for Airtable to have the Sub-Region resolve via the selected Country lookup.

If Airtable simply provided the ability to only show regions/states based on a the previous fields selection, without the base designer creating countless fields to accommodate - then we now wouldn’t be having this discussion about the same problem existing in interfaces - where at least a View Form has a workaround in place (that in my opinion encourages very poor base design).

TLDR; we absolutely need selection dependent fields at a base level, that both View Forms and Interface forms (and anything else really) can leverage.

Databaser
12 - Earth
12 - Earth

But will everyone still need an Airtable account, like I read somewhere? Because you can’t/won’t ask 90% of the external users who this would be intended for (external partners, clients, suppliers, …) to create an account so they can keep your data up to date… :expressionless:

Kim_Trager1
9 - Sun
9 - Sun

These looks great, but for me to really leverage the interface form it’ll be really useful if one can create records when linking records.

Lots of my bases is about creating line items and then assemble them all into POs, Invoices, Delivery notes etc. and without there will be too much switching back and fourth from different forms.

But great step in the right direction to clean up user interfaces for users :clap:

Karlstens
11 - Venus
11 - Venus

Hello, If I’m understanding you correctly - coincidentally I solved this problem today using Automation and a Script Action, detailed here;

The technique is covered a couple of times in other discussions, but was hard to follow, so I made the effort to clarify things.

David_Smedberg
6 - Interface Innovator
6 - Interface Innovator

Thank you for highlighting this change! This is a great start.

We have a very important use case for our business (a Master Data Management solution) which uses the “Redirect to x after form is submitted” feature. We actually redirect the user to the URL of another page in the interface, and fill in the new record with the {record_id} placeholder.

We also have other use cases where customizing the message is important as well.

Could you please confirm whether redirecting and message customization are coming and do you know when if so? Thank you!

Kim_Trager1
9 - Sun
9 - Sun

Hi Karlstens

Thank you for highlighting
As I understand correct from this comment.

This script executes upon a new Project record being created, where users select sub-tasks from a dictionary that need to be carried out within that Project.

There needs to be some preset choices for the user to choose?
What I was referring to is not having presets to those choices from - but let the user make linked record on the fly, kind of how you already can add a new record in a linking field.

Mainly so the user don’t have to switch between interfaces. First go to one table to make line items and then to another to link them all together.

Julian_Kirkness
10 - Mercury
10 - Mercury

Seems to work well so far - but it would be very useful to the able to trigger an Automation when a Interface Designer form is submitted (as you can with regular forms).

Karlstens
11 - Venus
11 - Venus

I can’t confirm exactly, but if you have a form where the user inputs values into a text field, writing for example;

What are your 3 fav colours?
red,green, blue

That upon the form being received, you could have an Automation parse that text field as an array, and then enter those items into a Linked Lookup to a Colour Dictionary table, and then some logic such as, if the colour doesn’t exist, create and link it (or reject it and don’t create/link), or otherwise link the existing colour.

This would allow for a user to enter data into the form that may or may not exist, without them seeing other options that may have been entered into that field. The problem is however, can’t think of colours to add, or spells them incorrectly…

It would be handy for automations to have a Interface Form trigger item, similarly to how one exists for a View Form.