New Form Builder - Unable to sort Linked Records f...

[mmj-916]

I have a form that is letting people create Inventory Request Records, choosing Item Records they would like to check out from our inventory. We would like to have a way that will automatically prevent them from choosing an item that will be checked out during the dates they have selected.

Using the filters and conditional options for these fields, I only see being able to toggle visibility for the results of the "check in date" and "return date". I would like to use the values from the questions asking for the dates to compare to the records in our "Items" grid so "Items" checked out will not be visible but I cannot find a way to do this. We are not able to use a 3rd party platform.

Any guidance on maybe how to rework the fields to allow us to use the info from previous answers to help filter their selection? Is there any way to have formulas or more advanced coding in these forms?

[TheTimeSavingCo]

Hmm, I'm not aware of any existing functionality that allows you to do this via Forms or Interface forms.  There isn't a way to have formulas / more advanced coding in these forms at this point, no.

I can think of a pretty convoluted way to do this involving an automation and linking all your records to a single record in another table, but the downsides would be:
1. Only one person could ever use the Interface at a time.  If more than one person ever used the Interface it would break horribly
2. It would consume one automation per date filter check, i.e. when the user keyed in dates an automation would need to run to display all the items that aren't checked out
3. The user would have to click a button after keying in the dates they want to run the automation in order to display the items, which could get frustrating if they're checking a bunch of dates

[ScottWorld · Accepted solution]

@mmj-916 

You mentioned that you can’t use external tools, but that is really the path forward. You could easily do this with Fillout’s advanced forms for Airtable.

Otherwise, if you need to stick to one unified database app to do this, then in my personal opinion, the best database app that has this functionality natively built into the platform is FileMaker.

I used to be a FileMaker Developer for almost 30 years before becoming an Airtable consultant. Feel free to reach out to me through my website if you’d like me to turn you onto some excellent FileMaker developers, or if you need an expert Airtable consultant. 

[mmj-916]

Hi Scott,

Thanks for this. I appreciated exploring this option and I was able to find a work around with this method. I still was not able to filter them in the way I needed due to fillout's limitations but at least we were able to display the unavailable date value from the Items linked record field which wasn't possible with regular interface forms.

Thank you for the suggestion.