Have customers update their own records through unique link + form?

[JanBolmeson]

We would appreciate help with this scenario - and we can pay if somebody can help us with it. We have several bases where we have e.g customer info. Sometimes we do a campaign where we send out a link to a form where we want the customer to get back to us with specific info.

This works excellently. The design is basically

Table #1 Customers

• Primary key
• Custom info #1
• Custom info #2
• Link to CustomerResponses

Table #2 CustomerResponses

• Primary key
• Link to Customers
• Custom info #3

Form in Table #2

• Link to customers (=shows the +Add button and all customers according to Primary Key)
• Custom info #3

Now, the problem. In order for this to work, in the form we need to show ALL the records. Hence our customers can view each other, which is not great. We would like to be able to SKIP the “Link to customers” (i.e. the +Add-button) and replace it with a unique link to the form instead where the unique link defines the primary key.

Hence, each customer would only get a form with “Custom info #3”. Is this possible?

[JonathanBowen]

@JanBolmeson - what I tend to do in these cases (but it is dependent upon the data you have), is make the customers enter a unique key in the form in a single line text field. Email address is great for this as most people have them and rarely spell them incorrectly.

Then when the record comes in to the responses table use an Airtable automation to copy the email text response into a linked field, connecting table 2 with table 1. This assumes that email is the primary key on your customers table.

[Rupert_Hoffsch1]

Hi @JanBolmeson, this is not possible with forms at the moment. You can pass a unique link, but only if you keep your linked field (and hence it doesn’t make sense for you).

My suggestion goes in the direction of @JonathanBowen: Get the customer to enter a unique identifier, which can be used to match that customer between your two tables. Email address works well for this of course, but if you don’t want that it can also work with other details (full name, company name, …). I think writing a small script makes more sense than copying data over via automation, as it’s easier to prevent duplicate records being created (in cases where script doesn’t match, it would notify you for instance).

[ScottWorld]

@JanBolmeson 

The best & easiest & quickest way to do this is to use Fillout’s advanced forms for Airtable.

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 & Airtable attachments & formulas 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, set advanced field validations & limitations, 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.

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 

[JanBolmeson]

JonathanBowen:

@JanBolmeson - what I tend to do in these cases (but it is dependent upon the data you have), is make the customers enter a unique key in the form in a single line text field. Email address is great for this as most people have them and rarely spell them incorrectly.

Thanks for the reply, this is actually very similar to what we use at the moment. :slightly_smiling_face: Just thought I missed something in the docs.

ScottWorld:

@JanBolmeson Alternatively, you can always have customers update their own records directly by paying extra money for an external portal tool such as MiniExtensions.com.

Thanks I will check this out. :thumbs_up:

[ChrisDrit]

JanBolmeson:

Hence, each customer would only get a form with “Custom info #3”. Is this possible?

You didn’t specifically mention this, but I’ll just throw this out there…

With a Webflow account and using a glue service like Make, you could definitely do this. The Webflow CMS gives you a unique url for each item you add to it, so you could definitely send a customer to a page with a form for “Custom info #3” only.

[JanBolmeson]

Thank you for your kind replies. More than I hoped for. :blush: :pray:

[Julian_Kirkness]

Hi @JanBolmeson

Airtable’s Form feature includes the option to pre-fill fields via a URL parameter AND to hide said pre-filled field - for example, this URL links to a form for one of my test bases and fills in and hides the Project field:

https://airtable.com/shrmllHVsG8klygPB?prefill_Project=New%20one&hide_Project=true

You can construct the URL in a simple formula field so that you have a link to use for each customer.

Here is more documentation on this:

Airtable Support

Prefilling a form

When making an Airtable form, you can use prefill_ parameters in the URL of the form to prefill specific fields. Note that this feature cannot be used to edit information that already exists in you...

Hope this helps!

Julian

[woodielanderos]

This is the way, genius.

[HannesK-ME]

Hey everybody, Hannes here from the miniExtensions Team.

As Scott has already mentioned above, we have a portal tool which would be perfect for this use case! Users (who are defined in a specific table in Airtable) can just log in and are then presented only the records that are linked to them. If they create a new record from inside the portal it automatically gets linked to them as well. This would be an ideal solution for this use case.

I also wanted to add (in case anybody comes across this post in the future) that we actually also have another feature that would work around the limitation Jan mentioned in his initial post. The issue of users seeing each other's records when adding a linked record can be resolved by our form's "show only when search is exact match" feature. This way, users would need to type in their name or email exactly to see it. Anything that's not an exact match will not show up. 

Let me know if you have any questions about this!