Prefill a Specific Date in a Form

[Julian_E_Post]

I’ve seen a lot of requests for specifying Today() as a prefill option for a date field, but I haven’t been able to find any asking whether you can pass Airtable a specific date as a prefill option. Is this a thing?

[kuovonne]

Yes, you can prefill a form with a specific date. You may need to play around with the url encoding of the date string you use.

[ScottWorld]

I think he means that he wants the form to continually pre-fill with a different date, depending on today’s date. The only way to do that would be to keep changing the URL, yes?

[kuovonne]

To prefill a form with a different date would require a different url with different url parameters.

However, I’m not sure what you mean by “continually prefill”.

Perhaps @Julian_E_Post can give more details with some specific examples?

[ScottWorld]

“Continually prefill”: meaning that the value changes every time someone goes to the form.

@Julian_E_Post: What you want to do is not possible with Airtable’s forms. You would need to use a more advanced form building software like JotForm, which lets you set the default date to today. This support article has a screenshot which shows you your default date options:

jotform.com

Online Form Builder & Form Creator | JotForm

How to change the default date on my form?

[Julian_E_Post]

Thanks @ScottWorld and @kuovonne . For this post, I am interested in how to input a static date. The URL will change based on a formula in Airtable. What is the string format that Airtable will accept to prefill a date and time. For example, Jan 28, 2021 at 8:00am?

[ScottWorld · Accepted solution]

@kuovonne has actually created an app that makes it very easy for you to create your prefilled URL:

Airtable

Prefilled Forms - Apps - Airtable Marketplace

Prefill forms with field values on Airtable with the Prefilled Forms app.

The string format (before you URL encode it) should be as simple as this:

1/28/2021 8:00am

[Julian_E_Post]

Very cool! I am completely new to URL encoding, but I can reverse-engineer @kuovonne 's app-generated urls to figure it out. Thanks!

[ScottWorld]

You don’t really need to worry too much about it, because the ENCODE_URL_COMPONENT function takes care of it all for you.

Also, here’s a support article on how to manually create your own prefill URLs:

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...

[Paul1]

the key to prefilling dates is DO NOT encode the date:

this won't work- prefill_Date%3D2024-08-26T17%3A00%3A32.802Z

this will work- prefill_Date=2024-08-26T17:00:32.802Z