Displaying and Rating Images in a form?

[Jemma_LeRoux]

Hi, new Airtable’r, I searched around but couldn’t find answer to this!

I’m surveying my customers about their opinions on products we’re considering developing. I have a base that contains a table with details about all the potential products, including a field I made customer ratings.

I’d like to create a from that displays every product in the table, showing its image and description, and a place to collect their rating for that product. I’d like to be able to use that form to see customer’s average ratings of them.

Is this possible?

Thanks!

[kuovonne]

Welcome to the Airtable community!

Having a base with details about potential products and customer feedback sound like a great use for Airtable. However, I don’t think that you can create the form you want with only Airtable.

Airtable’s native forms can only be used to generate new records in a table. They cannot display or update existing information in a table. Further, each field in a form corresponds to a different column in a table, not a different row.

There are workarounds for getting information into Airtable that involve using 3rd party services (Stacker, Zapier & JotForm, etc.). However, these services have their own subscription fees and I am not familiar enough with them to be able to say if they will address your specific use case. Using the Airtable API is another possibility, but it would require a full stack web developer quite some time to learn the API and code everything.

On the other hand, even if you need a different method for gathering the data from your customers, Airtable is a great platform for analyzing that data. I suggest that you have your ratings in a second [ratings] table in the same base, rather than in the same table as the products. This second table would have several fields:

• a primary field that is a formula
• a link to the product in the [products] table
• the customer name
• the rating
• any additional comments

You can then use rollup fields in the [Products] table to calculate the average, min, max, and number of ratings for each product across all customers.

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I’m sorry that I don’t have better information for you, but I didn’t want you to think that your question was being ignored. It could be that you haven’t gotten more replies because no-one knows how to implement what you want using just Airtable.

[kuovonne]

On further thought, it might be possible by chaining Airtable forms with prefilled URL variables. Let me think some more on it.

[Jemma_LeRoux]

Thank you so much @kuovonne! I’ll start exploring some alternatives, but will patiently await any other insights that might strike you.

It’s funny, this seems like such a powerful use case for the product—and one where all the elements are all accessible on a deep level—that I had just assumed it was built-in.

[kuovonne · Accepted solution]

Thank you for your patience.

Here is a possible workflow for getting the customer input by chaining Airtable forms and prefilling the linked records. However, it is not nearly as polished an experience as you could get with something like JotForm, and it has some limitations.

Table setup

Create the two tables as I suggested before: one for the products [Products] and another table for the customer ratings [Ratings].

Form setup

In the [Ratings] table you need a new form for each product. For example, if you have 5 products, you will need five forms. You would need to manually enter the product description in each form. If you want to include an image at the top, you would need a Pro account.

Chaining the forms

You can chain forms together so that when the user submits one form, the webpage automatically redirects to the next form. You also need to prefill the forms so that each form is linked to the proper product.

At the end of each form, there is an option to redirect to a new URL after the user submits the form.

Airtable - Support

Guide to forms

Airtable forms let you collect information from anyone and save it automatically to an Airtable base. They're perfect for logging expenses, collecting RSVPs, creating polls and quizzes, collecting ...

This page has more info on making prefilled links.

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. Find the URL for the form you wish to prefill. Once you get the form URL, you can ...

You can get the record ids of the products to use in the prefill by creating a field with the formula RECORD_ID()

Tracking the Customer Name

If you want to track the customer name, you will need a few more fields and links. I am not including a description here as I do not want to overwhelm you.

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Since you are new to Airtable, this might be a bit much, but at least you know what is possible.

[Jemma_LeRoux]

Thank you so much @kuovonne! I’ll play with this and report back, really appreciate it.

[kuovonne]

Here is a sample base for chaining forms to perform a survey about three products.

Here is the starting form in the chain.

Each form in the chain corresponds to a different product and will create a new record in the [Reviews] table for that product.

NOTE: A copy of this base will not work immediately because the all the URLs and record IDs will change when it is copied. You will need to manually copy several things:

• Copy all of the URLs for the forms in the [Reviews] table into the URLS table
• Copy all of the record IDs for the products from the [Products] table to the [URLs] table.
• Finally, copy all of the calculated URLs from the [URLs] table back in to the end of the forms

If you have a Pro account that supports redirecting to a new URL after submitting a form, put the link in the redirect, instead of the message. With the redirects, the new records will all be linked together in the [Reviews] table in a series so that you can follow the chain and manually propagate the reviewer’s name by copying the name from the previous record in the chain.

If you have a Pro account, you can also include two images in at the top of each form.

[Jemma_LeRoux]

You’re a legend, Kuovonne, thanks again.

I fear I know the answer to this, but they’re physical products I need feedback for, so the ratings need to be based on seeing images of the product. If I’m understanding this correctly, the stumbling block for doing this easily is that you can’t actually choose to show records from the sheets (such as displaying image/text that exists in a row) and then collect data from the form to write to that row.

It sounds like only way I could do hack’y solution with being able to show images would be to display two images at the top, but only if I have a pro account, correct?

[kuovonne]

Thank you.

Yes, in order to include images in Airtable’s native form, you would need a Pro account and then you could include two pictures in very specific sizes and locations. Not idea, but better than nothing. Keep in mind, if you get a Pro account, you also get all of the other Pro features, which are quite substantial.

Depending on your budget and the importance for a more customized form, you might want to look into 3rd party integrations as I mentioned in my first post.

[larsst]

Is there a way to obtain ratings on multiple records without having to manually create individual forms? I am looking for a dynamic solution. Ideally something like a records view where each user can provide their rating.