I am looking for suggestions of available front-end interfaces for Airtable. There are a few limitations of Airtable’s own form view are:
no customization (can’t have description (e.g “i” next to the field name to the expand the description info), can’t change layout of the fields…)
[[POSTEDIT: can’t have custom names for fields… incorrect, you CAN have this in the Airtable Form View.]]
no record edit function (just new record … yes I can do some tricks with Automation and linked fields to lookup field in the background but it would be ugly plus the linked field picker in the form view is limited… see my point 4)
formula fields not showing (as view-only formula fields; I want to show the results of the a formula based on values I am entering in the form + if editing existing record, the values may be based on existing values for the record already saved in Airtable
Linked field - record selection list - the list of records only shows the 1st field of the record once the form is deployed (when editing the form, the record snippet shows 4 fields including a picture);
4a) No lookup field - related to previous point.
Details for 4) I am trying to lookup or get the highest used number in a field so that I know what’s the next free number I can use. (Auto-numbering will not work for me).
The approach I take is using a Linked field to a view showing the record with the highest number.The issue is however, in Airtable Form, the lookup field list only shows the 1st field and that is too truncated.
I can solve it by concatenating the 1st table field to include the SKU number and then would see in the linked record search list… however, this solution is rather ugly… to show the SKU number at the beginning of the field because the field gets truncated in the field picker list.
Any suggestions for suitable web-form apps able to solve the points 1-4?
All I need is to create a simple and single web-form, creating maybe 500 records per year. No other requirements. Some of these solutions offer bells and whistles like storefront, payments integration etc… I don’t need all of that.
I believe of those 4 points above all would be valid features that Airtable should offer with their form and there would be no need to look for outside solutions…
Here is a list of 7-8 web-apps I looked up but haven’t tested them, some require signing up for a quite costly subscription even before I know it works the way I need:
Don’t forget Airpress plug-in for Wordpress has the potential to be a free front end for Airtable. Documentation is limited at best though, particularly in the input from Wordpress to Airtable area (more help available for output, but still not great).
Have tried Softr for making a simple wiki style catalogue and that part works great! As far as manipulating or adding data though I haven’t tried - I think you need the paid subscription for that…
Sounds like you could achieve what you want with an embedded Airtable form and some automations to me - as long as the data was returned via email or similar. Have you tried the “on form submission” trigger?
Hi Joe_Hewes, welcome to our community and thanks for responding. I appreciate. Yes, it may be possible.
I am not a programmer. If you mentioned there is little documentation, well Wordpress may not treat people like me with kindness. That is assuming Wordpress can also edit existing records. If Wordpress can edit existing records, that would be very very interesting alternative.
Thanks for the info. I will work on changing the table so I’ll start looking into the forms later this summer.
AirPress has very little documentation. Some WordPress plugins have great documentation; AirPress isn’t one of them. This is in part because AirPress is free. AirPress is capable of editing existing records using the the REST api. However the editing features in AirPress are completely undocumented, and not really usable by a non-programmer.
The main benefit of AirPress versus the other front end systems available is that it is free.
