Read Only / Lookup Field In a Form

[Abbey_Matye]

Hiya!

I'm trying to create a registration form to send out to external users, but want them to be able to see the remaining capacity of each event, to know if they can register for the event. I tried to do this via a lookup field and as a read only field to find that Lookup fields aren't supported in Forms and Read Only fields won't appear in the public facing form. Is there a work around for this?

I have the form set up where if an event is at capacity it won't show in the form, but haven't found a way for it to not accept registrations causing the event to go over capacity, which is why I though the registrant seeing the remaining capacity would be helpful. 

For example:

A teacher wants to register their class of 40 for one of our spring concerts. Their first choice is Concert A, but when they selects Concert A, they sees it only has 30 spots left, thus they should go with a different choice. [as it stands right now Concert A is still a choice since it is not at capacity, but it would still technically allow the teacher to register their 40 students, putting it over capacity...]

Any ideas Airtable cohort?

[Pascal_Gallais-]

Hello Abbey,

I do not believe that you can achieve what you want in a "public form", but there may be a turnover that I am not aware of.

My suggestion is to ask for an email adress in your form and to set up an automation to send a confirmation mail to the person who posted the request with 2 IF statements to send a mail "Not enough avaibilities left for you request" when booking goes over capacity, and to send "Booking confirmed" when booking is valid.

This solution is not ideal, but your customer does Know that he has to search for another event.

Maybe someone has a better solution to your issue.

Regards,

Pascal

[Sistema_Aotearo]

You could probably achieve this separately from the form.

For example, if you made a shared view of the responses. You'll have to configure this so it won't display any personal data.

A more complicated option would be to have a new table that collects form responses. This way you can display each form with percentage bars, and even link the form directly in the view.

[TheTimeSavingCo]

Might want to just use Fillout.com for this!  They let you do math within the form itself as well as display values from lookups / rollups, so you could potentially allow the teachers to input the number of students they want to register and prevent them from registering for concerts that don't have enough seats

[ScottWorld]

@Abbey_Matye 

All of this is possible with Fillout’s advanced forms for Airtable.

Fillout is 100% free and offers hundreds of features that Airtable’s native forms don’t offer, including the ability to update Airtable records from a form, display Airtable lookup fields & Airtable rollup fields & Airtable attachments & formulas on forms, dynamically & conditionally filter linked record fields by any values that you would like, perform math or other live calculations on your forms, accept payments on forms, create multi-page forms with conditional paths, create new linked records on a form, display as many fields as you want to see in a linked record selection list (including attachments), connect a single form to dozens of external apps simultaneously, limit the number of linked records that can be chosen, upload an unlimited amount of attachments simultaneously, add CAPTCHAs to your form, add choice matrixes to your forms, direct integration with hundreds of apps like Calendly & Google Maps on your forms, and so much more.

Hope this helps!

— ScottWorld, Expert Airtable Consultant

[Abbey_Matye]

Thanks all!

I ended up finding a work-around yesterday by having my primary field be a formula that pulled info from other columns (so the main record name is pulling the event name, date/time, and the spots available), which seems to be working in the meantime. But, since we don't need to publish these sign up forms yet, I'm definitely going to play around with fillout!

[Pascal_Gallais-]

Hi Abbey

I thought of this solution to, but I did not propose it because I am not sure that it is a very good idea to have your primary field values changing all the time (it may cause some problems in some specific automations).

I am currently playing with Fillout, it is indeed very handful.

Thank to you Scott for sharing this information.

Regards,

Pascal