New Feature: Hide Form Field by URL Parameters

This is awesome. Can’t wait to try it out

Yes !
Airtable :boxing_glove: MiniExtension
But MiniExt not dead yet.

We gonna stop writing “DO NOT TOUCH THIS FIELD”

Haha! I know, right?

What I would also like is one that is prepopulated and LOCKED for input but still shown on the form.

This is great - would love to see this as a native feature in the form field settings (vs passing the url param for hide=true) since all a user has to do is delete that parameter and see the field (which can be problematic for example if the field is looking up private records you don’t want visible on a form.

This would be great for automatically linking form submissions to customer records.

BUT

I fear if you pre-filled a linked record field for the customer (we use email as the index) and then hide it, if the recipient then unhides it (by amending the link) they’d be able to see the index field. Get access to the index field and Airtable reveals all of your clients by suggesting completions.

Tell me I’m wrong, please :slightly_smiling_face:

For security reasons, you should never use a linked field directing users to master data fields that could be guessed or inferred.

That being said, if you use this feature you should be aware of it’s implications.

@Ron_Manke is spot on and we did include a note in the documentation about not using this as a security feature.

You probably dont want to use this with linked records but you could use it to prefill an email and have an automation triggered by a form submission populate that linked record relationship.

Welcome (back I guess) to the community! Good thing to see more Airtable employees here :raised_hands: :facepunch:

Yah, it’s a great step forward - but still needing a method to prevent the user from tinkering with the URL.

100% - would be great to have conditional logic based on url param (ex. if param is blank, hide/show form field)

This is great! Just when I needed it (again) :thumbs_up:

Huge quality of life change, keep it up :thumbs_up: !

You can already show/hide fields based on conditions from previous fields in the form. This feature lets you hide a field, yet still have its prefilled value be submitted with the form. Previously, prefilled values were not submitted if the the field were hidden.

Currently conditional logic exist based on a previous form field, not the url param being present or not … unless Im wrong?

I want the control the conditional logic based on the param value itself (not a form field) … not to mention, what if the field in question is the first question in my form (ex. the answer to the param dictates what questions I ask on the form itself)

Do you believe this is possible with the example in my previous comment?

You would create a “control” form field to hold the parameter value, prefill the control field with the value, and then hide the control field. Then other fields in the form could show or hide themselves based on the value of the hidden control field.

So the workaround would be to create a dedicated column with the sole purpose of toggling the actual field I want to control with the parameter?

@Jordan_Scott1 Thank you very much for posting this official rollout of this feature. This post gives me the confidence that it is safe for me to make updates to my Prefilled Forms app to support this new feature.

Given the recent rollback of two desirable features (editable shared views and the new formula editor), I think you understand the importance of knowing whether a new feature will stick around before we invest in it.

Additional Feature Request:

Can we also enable “Hiding Form Titles”? This would be most helpful in the application of embedding forms on sites. ( :slightly_smiling_face:

Totally agree. This is one of my concerns but it’s a step in the right directions.

couldnt you just put white space where the title should be

You can now use Field IDs instead of field names/form field title in your URLs for both hiding and prefilling. We’ll get the support article updated soon, but I wanted to let the community know first.

Off topic from forms, but you can also use Field IDs in Shared view URL filters too

These improvements should help make form links more resilient to breaking when field names or form field titles change!

This is super useful!!!

Bye bye " Please, please do not change this field"

This is HUGE thank you!

@marks I was thinking of hiding the recordid() to link and gather unique post survey info from participants each having their own link. Since I was already planning on prefilling their name and email, would hiding the linked recordid which just shows their name affect privacy?