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!

[Dennis]

Every time I run into an Airtable issue and google it, I find this forum.

And every time

• there’s a very old thread that’s still active because it’s still an open problem
• airtable has not yet responded or acknowledged the issue
• the community attempts to find awkward workarounds

I’m starting to think this forum is the dumping ground for the community to try helping each other without having any real power to improve the product, until an actual airtable team triages through these and prioritises them.

Please spend time on quality of life improvements. If it weren’t for attachments, I’d ditch Airtable.
I’m using sheets with grouped views and creating accidental empty records happens all the time.

[Gunter_Otte]

I’m sharing exactly the same feeling, but as long my clients are insisting on using AirTable, there is not much I can do besides making workarounds and trying to live with the issues…

[nnnnneil]

Bump bump for this issue. Double click to create new record could be a solution?

[Olivier_Blanqua]

same issue but looking at this thread from 2017…

[B_A]

Fast forward from 2017 to 2022, the issue still persists :man_facepalming:

[ScottWorld]

You can now use table permissions to prevent creation of records in a table.

[B_A]

@ScottWorld, that’s not what I want, and from what I can see not what most people here want. What we want to prevent is the (accidental) creation of blank records. The solution is pretty straightforward - we need an equivalent to the MySQL “NOT NULL constraint”.

[ScottWorld]

Airtable doesn’t offer record validations. All new records start off as blank, and you can’t tell when somebody is done interacting with a record, so you’d have to come up with some other way to delete blank records after the fact — either manually or via an automation. If you go down the automation route, this can currently only be automated by writing a custom script or using an external automation tool like Integromat.

You can always support@airtable.com to ask them to add validations into their product, but my guess is that it’s unlikely to happen anytime soon.

[B_A]

I see what you say. Then again, you don’t get $735 million Series F funding if you’re doing something that’s easy to do :winking_face:

[Gunter_Otte]

ScottWorld:

You can now use table permissions to prevent creation of records in a table.

Is this for API creation as well? What I like to see is no manual (blank) creation, but creation via API allowed.