Use Interface Designer or Forms to pull records (conditionally) and send to customers to approve

[inno-mark]

Thanks in advance everyone - Tried searching but couldn't find anything recent/relevant 

Currently we are using email automations to conditionally send first articles to our customers to approve, which works - but I'd like a more elegant solution. 

In an ideal situation, once a record matches certain conditions, it sends a form (interface or other) pulling the image from our base, and the customer can use a check box / comment section to send approval back to us - and updates our records with the checkbox selected and or comments sent.

Thanks again - If I missed anything in my search, another advanced thank you for pointing me in the right direction.                                                                  

[ScottWorld · Accepted solution]

If you pay for your customers to have their own Airtable accounts, then you could do all of that with Airtable's interfaces feature. However, that could get very pricey very quickly.

Otherwise, you can do everything that you'd like to do for 100% free with Fillout’s advanced forms for Airtable.

Fillout lets your customers update their own Airtable records from a form, and you can decide which fields should be editable by them or not. You would just send them their own unique link to update a specific Airtable record. Fillout gives you the formula that you would put into Airtable to generate the unique link.

— ScottWorld, Expert Airtable Consultant

[inno-mark]

Appreciate it very much ScottWorld - Thanks so much, this is the solution for me! 🙂 

[TheTimeSavingCo]

Yeap, you can do this with Airtable forms!  You'd create a prefilled form and send it out via an automation, and once the customer submitted it you'd update your records as needed

Here's Airtable's guide on how to do that:  https://support.airtable.com/docs/use-case-update-records-via-a-form

Both form views and Interface forms are free to access and you don't have to pay for your customers to use them!

[ScottWorld]

@TheTimeSavingCo 

No, you are incorrect.

He said that he would like to display information from the record — such as images — on the form for the customer to approve.

This is not possible with Airtable’s forms, but it is possible with Fillout’s advanced forms for Airtable.

Furthermore, with Airtable’s forms, the prefilled link would have to continually change every single time the customer made a change to the form.

But with Fillout, it is always one static unchanging URL that represents the Airtable record.

Fillout is the only way to do this via forms.

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 & formulas & display Airtable attachment images 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. 

— ScottWorld, Expert Airtable Consultant

[TheTimeSavingCo]

Oooh yeah you're right, I missed the bit about the image, that's not possible with Airtable forms at this point!

The prefilled link would be automatically updated by a formula though, so what would be the issue there?

[ScottWorld]

The problem is that you would have to continually send the customer a brand new prefill link after every single form they submit, so the customer would need to constantly keep track of what the newest prefill link is.

If the customer clicked on an old prefill link, they would get a form filled in with outdated information.

The reason for this is because Airtable really isn’t updating any records — it’s simply creating new records with old data that is auto-typed into the form (which the user can override).

But then, the worst part of all (which I forgot to mention above) is that you would also need to create an automation to merge the newly-submitted form data into the original record.

All of the above is doable, but it’s a gigantic pain and is prone to many errors.

With Fillout, it uses a static unchanging link for the record, it is actually reading the data from the record in real-time, and it is actually updating the record upon submission.

[TheTimeSavingCo]

Ahh, yeah I can see that, you're worried about customers going into old messages and clicking prefilled URLs!  I figured each new message that the customer was receiving contains the automatically generated prefilled URL, and so they'd just click on that.  But yeah, if customers go to old messages and click on those links that would be bad!

I can see how creating the automation to update merge the data might be troublesome even with the guide that Airtable provides on how to do it too, and human error is always a thing like you said.  Being able to update data in an Airtable base with an Airtable form might be worth it to some people as they may want to avoid third party apps or potential subscription fees though!