Collecting customer feedback from form - Tasks and Subtask creation

[Coups]

I wonder if anyone's done anything similar?

We get customer feedback on designs and it's usually in the form of a spreadsheet emailed over, with feedback points per row so I'm creating a customer facing form for them to fill in so it's captured in Airtable as a task.

Our 'Task' structure is a Tasks table, and a separate one for 'Subtasks' that are linked records.   

Does anyone know if there'd be an easy way to allow the customer to create subtasks from the Feedback form before submitting? 

Currently if I pull in the Subtask field to the form, it allows them to select from the existing list of subtasks, but not create a new one.   Obviously the constraint is the 'Task' isn't yet created.

Any ideas? 😅

Ross

[ScottWorld]

That is one of the major limitations of Airtable. It is not possible to create new linked records from a form.

There are 3 workarounds for this limitation:

1. On the first form, give the user a link to another form which will add new records to the linked table.

2. On the first form, in the linked record field, give the user an option to choose from that is called "new record" or something like that. Then, conditionally show additional fields where they can type in the new information. Then, use an automation to add the new record into the appropriate table.

3. Use Fillout's advanced forms for Airtable, which already has this functionality natively built into its forms. Fillout is 100% free and offers hundreds of advanced features that aren't natively available in Airtable's native forms.

Hope this helps! If you’d 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

[Coups]

Thanks Scott - Much appreciated as usual!

My workaround was to create 15 fields in my Task table, Feedback 1, 2, 3 -> 15. and I only show them conditionally on the form if the previous one is filled out.  Then, I have an automation that will create linked Subtasks from those fields.  All good

BUT.

I wonder if you'd know, but I'm having a hard time with conditions in the Automation to ensure only records that aren't empty are created.   It seems I can only use 1 conditional group / if statement.  All other options are 'otherwise if', meaning it stops once the first condition is true.... I'd like it to be able to move onto the next condition each time.  Any way to do this?

My initial thought was have another automation that cleans up blank ones afterwards, but you can't delete records with automations : D Having a great time today!

[ScottWorld]

Yeah, Airtable's automations are also filled with a long list of limitations, such as both of the limitations that you mentioned above.

You'll also soon stumble upon the next limitation too, which is that you can only have 25 actions per automation.

You could create 15 different automations in Airtable, but that would be both inconvenient & wasteful, since Airtable also has yet another limit of 50 automations total. 

You could write a Javascript script to handle this for you, but that defeats the purpose of Airtable being a low-code/no-code environment.

In my opinion, your best 2 solutions are:

1. Use Fillout, which already has the form functionality you're looking for.

or

2. Outsource your Airtable automations to Make's advanced automations & integrations for Airtable. Make is arguably the most powerful automation & integration tool on the market, and its automations are thousands of times more powerful than Airtable's automations.

If you’ve never used Make before, I’ve assembled a bunch of Make training resources in this thread. For example, here is how you could instantly trigger a Make automation from Airtable. I also give live demonstrations of how to use Make in many of my Airtable podcast appearances.

-- ScottWorld, Expert Airtable Consultant

[TheTimeSavingCo]

Hmm, long shot, but if the customers have Airtable accounts you could try using an Interface that looks like a form to do this:

--
re: My initial thought was have another automation that cleans up blank ones afterwards, but you can't delete records with automations : D Having a great time today!

If you're on a paid plan you can use a "Run a script" action to delete records for you, here's a thread where people discuss how to do it: https://community.airtable.com/t5/development-apis/delete-a-record-by-automation/td-p/112769

And so you could have an automation trigger when a record gets created in the Subtasks table and is empty, does that make sense?

[Coups]

@TheTimeSavingCo - Thanks Adam, much appreciated!

They're not Airtable users unfortunately.  Having a play around with Fillout at the moment, and it is pretty cool.  Much more flexibility but our clients will need to fill out a separate 'mini' form to add each point of feedback for a subtask, which I don't think they'll like ...

I think I'm going to just have a bunch of blank feedback subtasks to deal with until I get my javaScript back up to scratch!

Thanks so much guys!