Add a new person within a form

[lcoo]

Hi, 

I have been trying to solve this, and I'm curious if there's a solution. Please see attached screenshot. I'm trying to add a contact within a form in a new interface that I built. How can I achieve this? I can't seem to have a + sign for users to add new contacts. It only gives me the option to choose existing contact. I want to add a new one from there. Any suggestions? 

Thanks!!!

[Mike_AutomaticN]

Hey! Unfortunately this is currently a big limitation of Airtable forms. It is not possible to create multiple records at once with one single form submission -e.g. one record for Note, whilst one new linked Contact (rather than existing contact).

I suggest you look into Fillout.com -super powerful form software, fully integrated with Airtable. Otherwise, you can always:
1. Have temporary fields for new contact (e.g. First Name; Last Name; etc) on the Notes table
2. Show those temp fields on your form,
2. After submission, if such fields are not empty, have an automation that will fetch such their values and create a new contact with its information (and link it to your Notes record).
From a database perspective, this approach is pretty dirty, but it will def work!

Mike, Consultant @ Automatic Nation

[Mike_AutomaticN]

For last, you could have a very very basic form for creating Notes, and once the Note record is created fill most of the information for it from the Interface itself rather than from a Form. In this way, via Interface, you will be able to create contacts from the Note record.

[ScottWorld]

@lcoo 

This 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, including the ability to add new linked records from a form.

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

[lcoo]

I appreciate the answers. I'm looking to move my database from Notion to Airtable, and this seem like a very normal step within Notion so I'm a bit surprised about this not being an option.

For now I have created a Record Picker element for a note and a Field of contact, as soon as I finish adding a note I will add the contact through there.

Any idea if this will ever be resolved by Airtable? This actually makes me concerned about my decision to change systems, as if such a small is an issue, what else will I find later on? Should I stop my movement and keep using Notion? (the main reason for the move was that Notion isn't strong with a larger databases as well as the good scripting within Airtable that requires Make/Zapier in Notion)