Prefilling AND Autosubmitting an Airtable Form

[DavidVM]

Does anyone know if it’s possible to generate a url in Airtable that would both prefill fields AND autosubmit the form.

I would like to be able to send a client a link (generated from an Airtable formula) via e-mail, that once clicked, would submit an Airtable form automatically with prefilled information. In other words, clicking the link would take them directly to the form submission confirmation page. All they have to do is click the link (or button in the e-mail) and their form is automatically submitted.

I know that this is now possible using Stacker.app, but I was hoping for a similar solution simply using e-mail. In Stacker.app they add "&autosave=1 at the end of the url, but this doesn’t seem to work for me outside of that app.

I’m guessing that this can probably be done using a e-mail button or link with a Zapier webhook, but I was hoping to avoid that if possible. If there is something similar to the “&autosave=1” feature, that would be ideal.

Thanks!

[ScottWorld]

If you want the form to autosubmit, it doesn’t actually sound like you want a form at all (which is designed for user input).

It sounds like you simply want an action to take place in your base — such as adding a new record with some predefined data — which is a completely different thing.

The #1 best and easiest way to do this would be to use Make’s custom webhooks and custom webhook responses. 

When the user clicks on a custom link that you create, the action will take place, and they will be taken to a custom response webpage that confirms the action that just took place. You can even optionally give them to chance to verify the action before the action takes place.

To learn more about how to do this exact technique, I give an entire demonstration on how to do this on this Airtable podcast episode.

If you ever need to instantly trigger a webhook from Airtable, I give more details on how to do that here:
https://air.tableforums.com/t/sending-airtable-data-to-an-external-webhook-such-as-make-com/159

And Make even created an entire Make Training Academy here.

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 

[DavidVM]

Thanks for the input Scott. I realize that this isn’t normally what a form is for, but I was hoping to have information added to my base without the need for client action (other than clicking a button to confirm the information is correct), and wanted to avoid using third party solutions such as Zapier and Integromat which require additional work and maintenance on my end.

The “autosave=1” feature in Stacker seemed to be a good solution for this, but only if the client clicks on the button from within Stacker. If this was an option with a standard Airtable form, I could prefill and submit a form using only Airtable, thereby adding a new record with some predefined data with a single click, and without the need for a third party service.

I’m always trying to automate and simplify things, but sometimes I guess we need to settle for what works. The solutions you mentioned will definitely do that.

Thanks for your input.

[wise]

Hi David! This is something I am trying to do as well, with exactly the same considerations. Did you have any way of solving this issue in the end?

[ScottWorld]

You may want to see if you can do what you want with Fillout, which is 100% free, and they offer the most advanced forms for Airtable.

They offer the ability to UPDATE EXISTING RECORDS in Airtable (instead of adding new records), they offer the ability to pre-fill forms, they offer ability to display read-only fields (like lookup fields, rollup fields, formula fields), they offer the ability to display any information from your base as read-only, they offer multi-page forms with conditional paths, and they offer “review pages” where the user can review the information before submitting.

Otherwise, you can do this with Make’s custom webhooks and custom webhook responses. You can give the user any sort of a response that you want in the webpage, including a list of all the data that you want them to see, and a chance to review before approving. I demonstrate a little bit (but not all) of this procedure on this Airtable podcast episode.