Re-Opening or Re-submitting Form Requests from Previous Form Request

[Kiersten_Kollin]

I am wondering if anyone has encountered this scenario below.

We have a team of graphic designers that will submit a form to the retouching team in Airtable.

Sometimes, the initial request needs to be changed and we are looking for a way for the designers to be able to re-open the request.

Most designers are not in Airtable and no designers are allowed within the Retouchers base.

Does anyone have any thoughts on a way of re-opening a request without having users in Airtable?

[CJSmith · Accepted solution]

Hi @Kiersten_Kollin, we've been running a similar workaround, ironically also for designers. This seems complex - 90% of the complexity stems from the initiators of the re-request being outside of the base ecosystem - but it should work following the setup.

There are five big components that will need to be introduced to the ecosystem:

1. A view-only grid of the Retouchers Base for the Graphic Designers to see.
2. A new "re-open" button field that, when clicked, opens the form and prefills any pertinent information.
3. A new linked record field that will connect the re-opened requests to the original requests.
4. A new "re-opened" checkbox field that will check itself via automation on the original request when a re-opening request is submitted.
5. An automation that checks that checkbox field.

Before I describe these components specifically, the workflow would be as follows: designers would look through the shared view to find a request they want to resubmit. They would click on the "re-open" button for that request, which would take them to a form prefilled with the information from the initial request, and also with a prefilled (optimally hidden) record link via a linked record field. Upon submission of the form, an automation would run that would use that linked record to locate the original request and check its "re-opened" checkbox. From here, it would simply be a matter of filtering the Retouchers base to exclude requests with the "re-opened" checkbox checked.

Let me know if that makes sense - wouldn't want to dive into ultra-specifics if this is enough to get you started!

[Kiersten_Kollin]

Thank you! I am glad to hear that this has been working for you team! This makes sense to me. I just came across this article in Support this evening talking about a similar approach above and have started to tinker with this idea.

https://support.airtable.com/docs/use-case-update-records-via-a-form

Thank you for your help!

[ScottWorld]

FYI: Starting in 2023, there is now easier way to update Airtable records with a form.

Fillout offers advanced forms for Airtable that allow you to create or update Airtable records with a form. 

Fillout is truly amazing — it’s 100% free, their forms allow you to create or update Airtable records, It also offers multi-page forms with conditional paths, accepting payments on forms, creating new linked records on a form, displaying lookup fields & formulas & rollup fields on forms, visually displaying as many fields as you want to see in a linked record selection list, limiting the number of linked records that can be chosen, and dozens of advanced Airtable-specific features that are not available in Airtable’s native forms.

Best of all, Fillout has direct, live, real-time communication with Airtable. There is no better form tool on the market that has better communication with Airtable than Fillout, because it was built from the ground up to work with Airtable.

I give a very brief demonstration of Fillout on this episode of the BuiltOnAir Podcast. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrqXdRNmQIY&list=PLqssva4liHRwHhQIpTXekG8WObEoyC2F1