I would like collaborators to be able to add rows and then be able to edit only rows they added. On the other hand they should be able to “read only” all of the bases content.
You can add a new field “collaborators” that will be the created_by type. Then You can create separated views per collaborator and lock them. Last step is to share those view with your collaborators and give them permissions for editing based on their name.
Airtable doesn’t yet offer that level of nuance when it comes to permissions. Airtable doesn’t yet understand record-level permissions. Hopefully someday in the future!
With @Dimitris_Goudis’ idea above, the users would still be able to edit other people’s records in Airtable, but you would be adding additional filtered views to make it a little bit easier for users to only work with their own records. (Also, shared views in Airtable do not yet allow editing, so shared views would not be a solution yet.)
So if you just wanted to make their data entry a little bit easier, you could go with the idea above (with the exception of the view sharing, which won’t work right now).
But if you’re looking for true security & functionality in these regards, you would need to turn to 3rd-party solutions to help you with that.
If you actually wanted to implement a system where your users could “view all” of the records but could only “edit their own records” or “add records” (that then become their own records to edit later), I would recommend turning to the MiniExtensions portal, which offers all of those features:
Your users would then need to use your base by logging into MiniExtensions instead of logging into Airtable, because if you give them access to Airtable, they would be able to edit all the records again.
Also, this can be relatively tricky to setup, so if you have a budget for your project and you’d like to hire an expert Airtable consultant to help you set this up, please feel free to reach out to me through my website:
Your proposed solution doesn’t really scale and it also requires a manual setup for each new collaborator so I’m not a big fan of this approach. On the other hand it may be the only way to solve the issue “out-of-the-box” so I’ll consider this. Thanks!
This basic “ownership” functionality seems a little expensive at $79 a month (on a monthly basis) for a feature one would expect to be built into Airtable itself.
I mean, if I invite internet “strangers” to collaborate on a community project I need to make sure no one can mess up the entire base accidently or maliciously. This would seem to be important in many cases so I don’t understand why this functionality isn’t built in yet.
Oh interesting, they increased their pricing to $79 if you pay monthly. It’s still only $39 per month if you pay annually. It seems like a pretty amazing deal, considering that you get an unlimited number of users for that price.
