New button types in Interface Designer

[Emily_Sermons]

Hi Airtable Community! :wave: I’m Emily, a product manager for Airtable’s Interfaces team — and I’m back again to share some new updates to Interfaces, available as of today!

Today we’re excited to announce four new button types enabled in Interfaces:

1. Run an automation

Trigger your automations from buttons in Interfaces! With this button type, you can create a net-new automation or trigger a preexisting automation from within Interface designer; you’ll be redirected to the Automations experience to further refine & test the automation before deploying. This button type is great for kicking off repetitive tasks in your team’s workflow, such as:

• Kicking off a slack message
• Automatically creating a new record
• Running an automation script

2. Navigation buttons

Use these Interface buttons to navigate internally and externally, including:

• Navigate between records: Configure this button to move to the previous and next record of a particular source.
• Navigate to URL: Configure this button to open an external URL. Choose from a specific URL field, or a static URL.
• Navigate to Page: Navigate to a given page in an interface.
  • Design tip: We recommend using “Navigate to page” buttons in scenarios when you want to quickly direct your end-users to a single action-oriented page in your Interface (ex: Create a “Report a bug” button that navigates to a bug submission form page). Rather than overloading your Interface pages with navigation buttons for each page, you can use the new Navigation Bar component that showcases all of your pages, launching in October!

3. Copy Record URL: Use this button to quickly copy the Interface link for a given record.

4. Delete Record: Use this button to delete a given record from your base.

In addition to these new button types, we are also launching an exciting enhancement to Update Buttons! Starting today, you can designate an “updated” visual state after the button has been clicked. This makes it easy to see whether a given update has already been performed.

This is just one of many updates we’re making to Interface Designer over the next few months, including: Kanban element, introducing Nav Bars, a redesigned editor, full-page expanded records, form improvements, and Interface Permissions. We can’t wait to see what you build!

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

[Ben_Young1]

Hey @Emily_Sermons
Super excited to dig in and start leveraging this release!

Kudos to you and your team for getting this deployed before the end of the week!
Pop into Slack and give them a huge thanks for the lift on this one.

[ScottWorld]

Thanks, @Emily_Sermons.

Can you please let us know when these button features will be brought to the buttons in Grid View (and all the other traditional Airtable views)?

In particular, most customers want to run an automation from the buttons in Grid View.

In the meantime, we only have 2 workarounds for this:

1. Instead of triggering an automation from a button, we can trigger an automation from a single-select field or a checkbox field. The advantages to using a single-select field over a checkbox field are outlined in detail in my post here.

2.  We can use a button field to trigger an automation in Make’s advanced automations & integrations for Airtable. This would be accomplished by starting the Make automation with a custom webhook, which provides a unique URL for each automation. Then, back in Airtable, the Airtable button field can be set to the URL of the webhook. The downside to this method is that it will open a new browser tab when the automation starts running, but the upside to this method is that you can customize that browser tab to display anything you’d like by using Make’s custom webhook responses. I discuss webhooks (in the context of email) in this Airtable podcast episode.

Hope this helps! If you would like to hire an expert Airtable consultant to help you with anything Airtable-related, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consultant — ScottWorld 

[Kamille_Parks]

Very nice additions!

It would be nice if buttons could use more icons from the pallet of icons Extensions can use (as opposed to just the checkmark), and the same button colors as the Data view buttons.

The button option to open an Interface page is nice. It would be even nicer if a future update allowed us to pass a record ID to the page being opened (so we could for instance open a record’s “parent record” in another interface).

[egordin]

This is an exciting update - thank you Emily and the Airtable team.

Emily_Sermons:

Create a “Report a bug” button that brings you to a bug submission form page

Is it possible for a button to open an Interface form? If so, I can’t figure out how to do it as those don’t seem to be listed as interface pages or have unique URLs.

[Kamille_Parks]

“open record creation form” is an option in the provided screenshot but not visible in my Interface Designer either. Maybe that’s supposed to be coming next update?

If your form is its own Interface page, use the “go to interface page” option.

[Emily_Sermons]

@Kamille_Parks Good catch — that “open record creation form” option in the screenshot is a feature our team is dogfooding at the moment! I’ve updated the screenshot to reflect only the publicly available functionality. No set launch date for that functionality currently, but we’ll likely include it in upcoming Record Creation improvements.

@egordin to your question: I would recommend either creating a navigation button that links to an Interface form page, or turning on the ability for users to add records to Record List & Record Picker elements (see no. 2 in this post if you want more detail).

[Emily_Sermons]

it would be nice if buttons could use more icons from the pallet of icons

Great feature request! We’ll keep that in mind as we explore more ways to customize interfaces in the future.

pass a record ID to the page being opened (so we could for instance open a record’s “parent record” in another interface).

We’re working on this “deep-linking” functionality now — the ability to pass a Record ID, query settings, and more through navigation buttons is something we’re excited about, too!

[Emily_Sermons]

No immediate plans to bring these button capabilities into the base views, but we’ll keep you updated if things change!

[kuovonne]

@Emily_Sermons Thank you so much for these features. :confetti_ball: :confetti_ball: :confetti_ball: :stars: :stars: :stars: They are a great addition. I am very excited to start implementing them in my interfaces.

Could someone post links to the relevant support pages for these features?

[kuovonne]

One of the new actions for Interface buttons is “Copy link to record”.

Note that there is no single “record url”. Each record can have multiple urls that will open the record in different ways.

• The “record url” in an automation uses the formula https://airtable.com/baseId/tableId/recordId and will open the record in expanded view in the first view for the table.

• The “record url” in the browser when you are viewing a record usually has the format https://airtable.com/baseId/tablId/viewId/recordId and will open the record in expanded view in the specified view. The browser url may also have optional query parameters that say if an extension dashboard is open.

• This “copy record link” button in an interface appears to use the format
  https://airtable.com/baseId/interfacePageId?recordPickerId=recordId