How to make a form from multiple tables?

[himg1509]

I have 3 tables - meals, dishes and ingredients.

use case: Users should be able to add new dishes and meals through a form. A meal is a combination of 1 or more dishes. Each dish comprises of many ingredients (note ingredients is a separate table)

So in a form submission, the user should be able to do two things:

1. Add a new dish including its ingredients (note ingredients is a separate table so should be stored appropriately)
2. Add a new meal and map dishes to it (a meal is a combination of one or more dishes)

Many thanks in advance
Himanshu 

[ScottWorld]

You can use linked record fields to let users link the appropriate items from other tables, but those items must already exist in those other tables.

Airtable doesn’t allow users to create new linked records through a form.

The 4 workarounds are:

1. Give the user a link to open up different forms for the other tables. They can create new records there, and then come back to the original form afterwards.

2. Give the user a linked record to choose from that is called something like “CREATE NEW ENTRY”. Then, conditionally show a bunch of fields that they need to fill out for the new linked record. After they submit the form, use an automation to actually create the new linked record. NOTE THAT THIS METHOD WILL NOT WORK IF YOU ARE EXPECTING THEM TO CREATE MORE THAN ONE LINKED RECORD, so a variation would be to create a whole bunch of conditional fields that appear for each linked record that you expect.

3. Use Fillout’s advanced forms for Airtable, which lets users create new linked records from a form, and also to update existing Airtable records from a form.

4. Rebuild your form with a very advanced form tool like JotForm, and then use Make’s JotForm & Airtable integrations to parse the information into the appropriate tables in Airtable.

[himg1509]

Scott, first of all thanks a lot. I'm new to airtable.

I need the user to add more than 1 linked record. So workaround 1 probably works better for my use case.

One challenge that I see is - it shows me only the ID of the linked record - in this case the ID of the ingredient. this is far from user friendly for the user who needs to add data to this form. screenshot below.

Is there a way out?

Cheers

Himanshu

[ScottWorld · Accepted solution]

Yes, that is another limitation with Airtable’s forms… it will only show you the primary field of the linked records. So you would be required to change the primary field in your linked table to become a formula field which contains all the field values that you want to see.

p.s. This is yet another limitation which was solved by Fillout, which gives you the option to display any fields that you want to see, without the need for creating a formula field.