Advanced rules for data input and validation

[Davide_Cencini]

Hi, I discovered Airtable just a few weeks ago and instantly fell in love with this application. It’s so cool! I am still new to it, but I’m learning so much.
However, as a former Access user, I’m surprised it doesn’t feature almost any advanced rules for data input and validation in fields. I’m even more surprised that so very few people are asking for them.
Data validation is important. For a solid database, it’s a core feature. Say I want to record a customer’s IBAN for money transfers. An IBAN always has exactly 27 characters; it’s not all right if someone by mistake inputs 25 or 28 characters or puts spaces into it. I need to set the IBAN field’s lenght to 27 characters and request that you fill out those 27 characters, not one less, not one more!
Same goes for zip/postal codes, or tax codes. Validation rules are needed for such fields. A lot of stuff can get messed up if this kind of data is not recorded correctly, such as payments, shipments, fees. It’s a serious matter!
Phone numbers and email fields should be validated, too, because they should not accept invalid characters.
I should be able to set Date fields to accept only certain ranges of data. Such as: “you cannot input a delivery date that is before today”.
I can’t even find such a thing as setting a field to “required”.
Even though the application is fantastic, these shortcomings are a major kickback for Airtable. Please consider introducing these features, I’m sure many users will be grateful!
As I said, I am new to the application so pardon me if I’ve said something wrong or I missed out on issues that have already been addressed.
Love ️

[Oliver_Marler]

Totally wild that there’s no data validation either in fields or forms.

Data integrity is really poor in general. You can’t even stop linking to multiple records. Even if you set the field to disallow it, if it gets linked more than once in the related table the rule gets violated with no warning message.

Airtable is a database with a nice interface but scant data integrity and sob no query language. In implementation producing endless check fields, and iterative filter views just are not the same thing). I could write an field populating SQL query in minutes that would be more useful than an hour of slicing and dicing tables and writing at times bewildering formulae. And not being able to encode effective data validation leaves me worried that unvalidated data fields could upend a whole pile of logic elsewhere in the base in areas where operators may never venture.

It’s quite bananas.

[Stefan_Faistena]

+1 for finally implementing some validators. Otherwise, its difficult to work with people who are not as familiar with data integrity issues.

[Matthew_Billman]

So… any updates on data validation? In particular, would be really nice to use REGEX, etc to specify arbitrary patterns. Google Forms does this, and it’s free.

[Collins_Santhan]

+1,

need this feature to validate data, ensuring that each entry is unique.

[Bianca_Padilla]

+1 we keep having blank fields inserted into the bases

[Dan_Hayward]

And me +1 !! People are incapable of entering the correct formats, and as I am already using many other workarounds to get airtable to perform well, this really slows things down for me.

[CrisT]

Absolutely agree. My company is currently on the Pro plan, and Airtable is used substantially. However, nobody “technical” has ever configured the bases; I’m the first technical person to have a look. I like what I have seen of Airtable so far, but without validation I’ll have to recommend to the business that this product represents a fairly high-risk, and that we should probably look for alternatives. We can’t have dirty data.

[Brad_Laney]

I just got the Airtable Newlsetter and it looks like they’re finally addressing this. See the excerpt below (with links).

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This month, we’re highlighting our mission to support more conditions. Plus, there’s other new Airtable additions that this past month has brought to fruition! Without further exposition, let’s get into this May newsletter edition:

• New: conditional form fields
• New: conditional lookup/rollup/count fields
• New: field & table editing permissions
• A roundup of other feature improvements
• Sign up for live trainings

[Stephen_S]

It’s a step in the right direction, but it’s not data validation. Now we can make sure the users entering/modifying data are the right people, but there’s still little control over making sure the right data is being entered.

[Sara_Larsen]

+1
Field validation would be a huge help. It looks like I can’t add conditional fields based on a formula, yet. Even that would help, but built-in field validation is a must-have!