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.

[matt_stewart1]

is there a button to open record in a different interface?

Im in interface A looking at a project, and need to jump into a different interface B for same project. Is there a way to setup a button to do so?

similarly open a record in a specific view?

[Karlstens]

Yah, I too am needing a method to take the record ID on Interface A, and then click a button to open Interface B in a new tab, and have that same record ID load on Interface B by default.

It would also be useful if that Record ID from Interface A could be set as the default record in a Record Picker on Interface B.

Another interesting option to have, would be a field value from the Record ID from Interface A feed into a Filter value on Interface B - that would be super powerful.

[Ruchika_Abbi1]

Not a button, but you can definitely have a URL field which will take you to the other interface with the record selected. Not pretty, but works.

[Joe_Hewes]

Button field with formula as the url does the pretty part :slightly_smiling_face:

Using url formula buttons for navigation Interface Designer

One technique that works well for interfaces is using a url button generated by a formula as an extra navigation element. For example: Create a button field on “table a” that is the base url for an interface based on the table, plus the record id - eg: "https://airtable.com/appid/interfaceid?WqRri=" & RECORD_ID() Place this button on an interface designed for showing data from “table b” alongside linked data for “table a”. When the link is clicked you’ll move to the “table a” interface, wit…

[Karlstens]

This is a handy workaround - it needs to be implemented directly into the Button so that we don’t have to create new Formula Fields to cater for interfaces.

[Casey_Kleiman]

Hoping for pagination and/or page anchor buttons are on the horizon. This is what will take the navigation to the next level. Currently if you need many different views for a single record we have to make a very long page with all the elements sub categorized or we have to have a very long menu and search the record every time you change the page. Thanks!

[Karlstens]

Today, I coded up a Button automation, and that button needed to be placed within a couple of different interfaces. I found it frustrating that I have to “duplicate” my automation, containing a couple of pages of Javascript, and then link each button (that does the same thing) to the duplicate Automations.

Such practice is asking for trouble. Can we please have the ability to link multiple buttons (typically on different Interfaces or Interface Forms) to the same Automation?

[jorge-pena]

Hi! I might be missing something here, but I'm trying to add a button that runs an automation. It's asking for a "Source" and the only way I can get something in that dropdown is placing a Record Picker element into the interface design (which I don't need in this particular case). The record picker is 100% unrelated to the automation but now I'm stuck with a record picker I don't need in the interface. Why would I need to add a Record Picker to a button that runs an Automation? Any other work-arounds? Thanks!

[ScottWorld]

Several of my Airtable consulting clients have asked for the ability to have button fields (not interface buttons) trigger an automation.

For example, clicking on a button in the grid view to run an automation. And this grid view might be in the data layer or the interface layer.

Currently, 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.

p.s. 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