PRODUCT SUGGESTION FOR FORMS: Hidden fields & hidden prefill fields that actually submit

[ScottWorld]

2024 update:

Even though Airtable eventually added this feature, all of this is possible in a MUCH easier & much more customizable way with Fillout’s advanced forms for Airtable.

Fillout’s advanced forms for Airtable are 100% free and offers hundreds of features that Airtable’s native forms don’t offer, including the ability to conditionally hide fields on a form, update Airtable records from a form, display Airtable lookup fields & Airtable rollup fields & Airtable attachments & formulas on forms, dynamically & conditionally filter linked record fields by any values that you would like, perform math or other live calculations on your forms, accept payments on forms, create multi-page forms with conditional paths, create new linked records on a form, display as many fields as you want to see in a linked record selection list (including attachments), connect a single form to dozens of external apps simultaneously, limit the number of linked records that can be chosen, set advanced field validations & limitations, upload an unlimited amount of attachments simultaneously, add CAPTCHAs to your form, add choice matrixes to your forms, direct integration with hundreds of apps like Calendly & Google Maps on your forms, and so much more. 

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Old post from 2020:

Not sure if this is a bug in Airtable or just a missing feature, but we really need this feature. Airtable needs the ability for us to have hidden fields on forms that will submit data upon form submission.

Currently, Airtable doesn’t accept the values from any hidden fields.

Here’s the situation:

My clients are currently having difficulties with Airtable forms, because prefilling fileds on forms (using the “?prefill_fieldname=” syntax) only works if the fields that you’re prefilling are actually visible upon submitting.

We’re trying to prefill hidden fields on the form that we’ve hidden using Airtable’s brand new conditional field feature for forms. So we’ve hidden a bunch of fields (using fake values that will always result in false). We’re forcing these fields to be hidden.

These hidden fields actually get their prefilled values filled in correctly!

How do we know this? Because if we type in the fake values to “show” these hidden fields again, the prefilled values are visible! The prefilled values are right there!

But — the only way to get these values to be added into our Airtable database upon form submission is to keep the field visible.

If the field is hidden, Airtable won’t submit the value into the base, which then defeats the purpose of having a hidden field to begin with.

Thanks!

[111219]

And for me too! This feature so easy to implement and so important!
I can’t find any reasons, why AirTables do not do this:(

[Evan_Walton]

agreed! thanks for posting this @ScottWorld

[Brooklyn_Music_]

I found a work around for this! BUT, it would still be awesome if Airtable implemented this suggestion :slightly_smiling_face:

Using the new Airtable automations feature, you can create a new Airtable record with whatever fields you need pre-filled, separate from what info the client submits in a separate form… So upon submitting a Google Form, I can populate fields in Airtable with info from the Google Form and whatever else I need in Airtable, determined by me.

[Odin_Team]

Hey Airtable, can we please please please have this feature?

[aleaja]

Agreed @ScottWorld. As I noted here, in addition to setting hidden form values via query argument, it would also be convenient to be able to define values for hidden form fields by view

[ScottWorld]

Yep, please keep bugging support@airtable.com about this minor but very important change to forms.

In the meantime, we all need to use a professional form building tool like JotForm or MiniExtensions.

[Kelly_Loucks]

Can we please get this feature?!

[Rebecca_Elam]

so they have done something that will help. you can now use the 'when a form is submitted trigger so you could run an automation to update the record when it is submitted

[david_schaerf]

How this is not a feature already is beyond me. Please add this soon :pray: :pray: :pray: :pray: :pray:

[david_schaerf]

Can you elaborate pls? When the form is submitted the contents of the hidden field or URL parameter will be gone so how do you grab them for the automation?