Intro
When I first started using Airtable, one of the features that I wanted was the ability to use a form to update a record's details. When diving into the forums, I noticed that many other users wanted this too! I also realised that there were third-party solutions to this.
I've recently stumbled upon an in-built Airtable solution!
This is possible only through Interfaces. This means that for your "form" to be accessible from users outside of your team, they will have to have Airtable interface access (which costs per user). If all users are within your Airtable team, then this works great!
The Set Up
The build for this is actually an interface and not a form. I stumbled upon this when I noticed that the new form builder in the interface designer had a very similar setup to the "record detail" interface designer.
Make a new Interface, either a list or a gallery or whichever way you want to display your data.
Select "Allow user to click into record details"
From here, you want the record details to be "Full Screen" so that a unique URL is generated for each record detail. You can then set this part up in a similar way you'd set up a form. Just make all the details "editable"! What's even better, you can display parts of the record as extra information and have those as "read-only"!
Now we have to set up the URLs in your data.
URL Formula
Now that each record detail has a unique URL, we need to make a formula so that with just a click of a button, we can edit the "form" (record detail interface) and edit the data.
All of the record detail's URLs should look exactly the same apart from somewhere in the middle.
www.airtable.com/app......./pag......./rec.......?..........
This bit in the middle is simply the unique Record ID. Find the table in which you're pulling your data from for the interface.
Your formula should look like this:
"https://airtable.com/app...../...../" & RECORD_ID() & "?....."
Replacing the "....." with your record detail URL.
You can attach this URL in a formula field or as a button. Then share a grid view so your users can find all the records with this button next to them.
Extra
I've taken this one step further and made QR codes from the QR Code extension. I've also designed these to be printed on labels and then stuck them to my inventory so I can scan and edit my inventory on the go! It works very well because it opens the record in the Airtable app, while before with custom prefilled forms, it would open a new tab in the browser.
End
I hope this helps some people build the things that I also struggled with for a long time! I'd love to have more discussions on how the new interfaces can be used, or even on how I have set up my label printer to work with Airtable.
Justin Ng
Programme Coordinator at Sistema Aotearoa
https://www.sistemaaotearoa.org.nz/
