Prevent creation of blank records in a table

[Julian_Kirkness]

Would it be possible to make it impossible to create blank records in Airtable - it’s so easy to create these that bases become littered with them. It’s even worse if you accidentally add a record in a grouped view because linked record are created which are otherwise blank.

One way to do this would be to give the user the option of making one or more fields ‘required’ - and without them the record would not submit.

I find having to constantly delete such empty records quite annoying!

[Michael_Berman]

Just a suggestion - I also run into the problem, so I filter empty records in my key views and have a view that shows just blank records which can easily be removed every once in a while… whenever I notice blanks in linked records becoming a problem, I go through my tables quickly and “clean house”. Maybe not ideal, but should work until they make a magic button…

[BenInDallas]

I think this problem is a real weakness of the AirTable interface, in grid view. The silly thing is that Airtable has already solved this problem in every view type EXCEPT grid view. ALL the other view types employ a big giant button (in the bottom right of the window) to add new records. That makes perfect sense, and makes it almost impossible to accidentally add a record. I don’t know why the same mechanism isn’t used in Grid View.

[Thierry_Gattlen]

I agree with this problem. It particularly problematic if you have an auto-number field because by deleting the blank records, you “break” the numbering of the records.
An idea could be to have a choice in the table or in the view to choose the way to create new record
Ex. View x from table Y: prevent automatic creation of records (Activ/disabled)

[Ryan_Lavalley]

I absolutely agree with this. I have multiple people putting data into our data base and they frequently create blank records that I then have to go in and delete. I would appreciate this usability upgrade immensely.

[Christoff]

Yes, this is annoying, especially when I’m in a filtered View and the new record disappears because it is filtered out.
I can’t delete the blank record unless I unfilter the current view (something that I don’t want to do) or I go to another view that displays the blank record, and then I delete it and then go back to my filtered view. Or, I can choose to ignore the newly-created record(s) with the intention of doing my clean-up later, in which case I’m sometimes surprised at how many blank records I’ve created.

[Laura_Rose_Golf]

I like the blank records in my tables - I’d hate to see them taken away completely.

[Larry_Leonidas]

Was just looking for the ability to disable auto-creation of blank records. Would be great to get this feature added.

Perhaps the best way to deal with this is to enable no more than one auto-created record via this feature, meaning if a blank rec is already at the bottom, don’t create another one.

[Michael_Crinni1]

Can I bump this? It seems like it would be an easy fix and I’m sure everyone who’s ever used Airtab;e has run into this problem at least once. I however seem to delete empty rows every day.

[CAHerrmann]

Double bump.

I use Airtable on a daily basis and, despite my efforts to keep it clean, am constantly deleting empty records created inadvertently by myself or another team member.

I know not having a submit or save button speeds things up on the front end, but it slows things down on the back end, when I have to go through and clean house.

[Julian_Kirkness]

I’d still like to see a proper solution for this - but there is now a possible way to automate the house keeping at least. With the latest update to the Integromat link to Airtable, you are now able to create logic to delete records from your Airtable base.

A very simple search records app which finds the records:

followed by an app which deletes the records returned by the search is all that’s required:

Remember to set the max records figure in the first step to a large enough value to return all the possible blank records and then the second step will run for all the records found.

You can then set your scenario to run as often as you want - or set it to run overnight for example.