Setting up forms which vary depedning on the time

[laurencekemp]

Hi all,

I'm trying to set up a form which has a dynamic appearance depending on the time of day/day of the week.

During our working hours I'd like users to be able to submit details through the form in order to receive an urgent response from our clinic team.  Out of hours, I'd like to divert the user to emergency contact details and a link which allows them to book a routine appointment with our team.

Any thought on how this could be achieved?

Thanks in advance,

Laurence

[TheTimeSavingCo]

Hmm, I think you could use Fillout for this

You'd fetch a single record from your base, and that record would have a formula that checked against the value of NOW() to see what kind of form to display (i.e. emergency or urgent response), and then you could use that formula's value to conditionally display parts of your form as needed, does that make sense?

[ScottWorld · Accepted solution]

Yes, that is correct.

The answer is to use Fillout’s advanced forms for Airtable.

Fillout can display formula fields from Airtable, like the time of day from the NOW() function.

See the screenshot below for how this could look on your form. And of course, this information could be hidden from your users as well.

And then, after getting the time on your form, you can create conditional logic based on the current time (I.e. conditional pages, conditional visibility, etc.).

However, note that since Airtable times are always attached to a date, you’ll need to create an additional formula in Airtable to just extract the time itself from the date field. That way, you can base your conditional logic just on the time of day itself. Otherwise, your conditional logic would need to incorporate the exact date as well.

Also, as mentioned above, Fillout can only pull formulas directly from Airtable when you are updating a pre-existing Airtable record.

So, you would just choose a record from your Airtable base that serves as the “updating record” for everybody visiting the form, and that would become a permanent part of the URL for your form. Fillout will provide you with the URL to use.

(Fillout has its own built-in formulas too, that don’t require the form to be an update form, but they don’t offer date/time functions such as current time.)

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 

[laurencekemp]

Thanks for your response.  Very detailed and helpful.  I'll give it a go myself.