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Update Record With Form

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AirtableIsGreat
5 - Automation Enthusiast
5 - Automation Enthusiast

Hello - I have a table for 'Booked Calls'. New entries come in when a call is scheduled and when the call time is passed an email goes to our client asking for feedback. The feedback is creating a new record and not updating the current records.

 

I've recorded a Loom to add context: https://www.loom.com/share/b24fb5b8f11b4a18a786075e2966d681?sid=7454058e-7874-482e-9696-99a4cbde75c3

 

Looking forward to hearing your support.

3 Replies 3
ScottWorld
18 - Pluto
18 - Pluto

Hi @AirtableIsGreat ,

Forms in Airtable always create new records, they never update existing records.

You have 2 options for working around this limitation:

1. You can have your form feed into an additional table that acts as the repository for all of your form submissions, and then you can create an automation in Airtable that finds the original record in the original table and updates the original record with the data from the form. You would also need to prefill the form if you want users to see existing data, which can get quite complex and doesn’t support attachment fields.

2. However, the much quicker, much easier, and much more bulletproof way to have a form that updates existing Airtable records is to simply use Fillout's advanced forms for Airtable. You wouldn't even need to prefill the form because it automatically pulls in all the record data that you'd like to see on the form.

Fillout for Airtable is 100% free and it offers over 100 advanced form features that Airtable's native forms don't offer, such as updating Airtable records from a form, displaying formulas & lookup fields & rollup fields & attachments on forms, allowing dynamic linked record filters (i.e. dynamic dropdown selections), the ability to have multi-page forms with conditional paths, the ability to create new linked records on a form, the ability to accept payments on forms, visually displaying as many fields as you want to see in a linked record selection list (including attachment fields), limiting the number of linked records that can be chosen, and much more.

I give a brief demonstration of Fillout on this episode of the BuiltOnAir Podcast.

p.s. If you have a budget for your project and you’d like to hire an expert Airtable consultant to help you with any of this, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consulting — ScottWorld

Ahh yeah, you can't update records with forms directly I'm afraid.  You can use automations to update your forms indirectly though, and Airtable put together a guide on how to do that here: https://support.airtable.com/docs/use-case-update-records-via-a-form

CristianCG
7 - App Architect
7 - App Architect

Hi there!

At miniExtensions, we've built a third-party form that offers various flexible options to get more out of Airtable. These options include editing submissions with a unique URL per record:

CristianCG_0-1728433618350.png

For your use case, you could use one or two forms, depending on what you want to show the clients when asking for feedback:

  • With one form for booked calls and feedback your clients will be able to add the feedback to the same record; however, they can also see and modify the other fields.
  • With two forms, you can have one for the booked calls without the feedback field, and another one exclusively to add the feedback, where the call fields are read-only or hidden.