New button types in Interface Designer

Hey @Emily_Sermons

Super excited to dig in and start leveraging this release!

Kudos to you and your team for getting this deployed before the end of the week!

Pop into Slack and give them a huge thanks for the lift on this one.

Thanks, @Emily_Sermons.

Can you please let us know when these button features will be brought to the buttons in Grid View (and all the other traditional Airtable views)?

In particular, most customers want to run an automation from the buttons in Grid View.

In the meantime, we only have 2 workarounds for this:

1. Instead of triggering an automation from a button, we can trigger an automation from a single-select field or a checkbox field. The advantages to using a single-select field over a checkbox field are outlined in detail in my post here.

2.  We can use a button field to trigger an automation in Make’s advanced automations & integrations for Airtable. This would be accomplished by starting the Make automation with a custom webhook, which provides a unique URL for each automation. Then, back in Airtable, the Airtable button field can be set to the URL of the webhook. The downside to this method is that it will open a new browser tab when the automation starts running, but the upside to this method is that you can customize that browser tab to display anything you’d like by using Make’s custom webhook responses. I discuss webhooks (in the context of email) in this Airtable podcast episode.

Hope this helps! If you would like to hire an expert Airtable consultant to help you with anything Airtable-related, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consultant — ScottWorld 

Very nice additions!

It would be nice if buttons could use more icons from the pallet of icons Extensions can use (as opposed to just the checkmark), and the same button colors as the Data view buttons.

The button option to open an Interface page is nice. It would be even nicer if a future update allowed us to pass a record ID to the page being opened (so we could for instance open a record’s “parent record” in another interface).

This is an exciting update - thank you Emily and the Airtable team.

Is it possible for a button to open an Interface form? If so, I can’t figure out how to do it as those don’t seem to be listed as interface pages or have unique URLs.

“open record creation form” is an option in the provided screenshot but not visible in my Interface Designer either. Maybe that’s supposed to be coming next update?

If your form is its own Interface page, use the “go to interface page” option.

@Kamille_Parks Good catch — that “open record creation form” option in the screenshot is a feature our team is dogfooding at the moment! I’ve updated the screenshot to reflect only the publicly available functionality. No set launch date for that functionality currently, but we’ll likely include it in upcoming Record Creation improvements.

@egordin to your question: I would recommend either creating a navigation button that links to an Interface form page, or turning on the ability for users to add records to Record List & Record Picker elements (see no. 2 in this post if you want more detail).

it would be nice if buttons could use more icons from the pallet of icons

Great feature request! We’ll keep that in mind as we explore more ways to customize interfaces in the future.

pass a record ID to the page being opened (so we could for instance open a record’s “parent record” in another interface).

We’re working on this “deep-linking” functionality now — the ability to pass a Record ID, query settings, and more through navigation buttons is something we’re excited about, too!

No immediate plans to bring these button capabilities into the base views, but we’ll keep you updated if things change!

@Emily_Sermons Thank you so much for these features. They are a great addition. I am very excited to start implementing them in my interfaces.

Could someone post links to the relevant support pages for these features?

One of the new actions for Interface buttons is “Copy link to record”.

Note that there is no single “record url”. Each record can have multiple urls that will open the record in different ways.

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  The “record url” in an automation uses the formula https://airtable.com/baseId/tableId/recordId and will open the record in expanded view in the first view for the table.

  
  


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  The “record url” in the browser when you are viewing a record usually has the format https://airtable.com/baseId/tablId/viewId/recordId and will open the record in expanded view in the specified view. The browser url may also have optional query parameters that say if an extension dashboard is open.

  
  


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  This “copy record link” button in an interface appears to use the format
  
  https://airtable.com/baseId/interfacePageId?recordPickerId=recordId

  
  

One request that I would have, although it doesnt just apply to buttons, is that it would be great for the buttons to be able to be smaller, similar to how they can be the length of their name in the header. I’d love to be able to have buttons like this but in the actual interface.

This would likely require a bit finer grid in the overall interface, which I too wouldn’t mind.

Thanks for this update, I’ll be using these features extensively.

May I ask for a button that copies record/field contents into the users clipboard? For example, it’s not unusual to have a formula field within a base with a lot of content that’s a little awkward to be visible within an interface - but users are needing to copy the content from

that formula field into their clipboard. An interface button feature to address this would be excellent.

EDIT: My initial Interface Button feedback;

Two other things I’d like to see developed;

1. Conditional button options. For example, if a field isn’t filled-out, then the button needs to be greyed out/inactive/locked. Scripted logic can obviously prevent a script from executing but the user will still click a button, mindlessly wondering why it no worky - which brings me to my next request;


2. Have an Interface Element that displays the executed script(s) Status and resulting Execution Log - being mindful that there may be multiple scripts executed, so will need to support scrolling (rather than extending the interface element forever down :grinning_face_with_sweat: )

Thanks!

This all sounds great! Excited to implement these in our standing workflows, combined with the new forms this should work well for adding records etc. Can’t wait to see the new nav bar too - any chance of a sneak peek? :grinning_face_with_big_eyes:

Loving the new changes! Can’t wait for the others to come through. One comment on the “Updated” state of the button. It doesn’t allow it to be clicked more than once. If I use this to save an edit, it only allows the button to be clicked once.

I know that Edit doesn’t really need a button, but in some use cases, it helps the user to know that the update has occurred.

Can you please clarify why automations are limited to connection to one button? I have buttons that defer due dates of tasks by 1, 2, and 7 days, and I have those buttons in (2) different task interfaces. Do I really need to duplicate my automations so that each button has a unique automation, even though the automations do the exact same thing?

Yikes, yes - it appears to be hard-coded, one button per one Automation… but I might worry about this problem more if I approach the 50 automation base limit.

It might be worth the thought of having script logic execute of what the one button/automation achieves.

I’d love to see dynamic button labels, so that we can change text/emoji’s depending on table conditions. At the moment, button labels seem to be static. This is a big complaint of mine for Field based buttons too.

I think that limiting each automation to a single button was an important decision in getting this feature out quickly. If multiple buttons could trigger the same automation, there would have to be extra logic in there to make sure that both buttons were referencing the same table. (Or even better, have the triggering table be determined by the triggering record.)

I believe that eventually we will get the ability to trigger the same automation from multiple buttons. It just takes time for Airtable to develop these things, and I am glad the current functionality wasn’t held up until in the meantime.

Remember when we could not re-arrange or duplicate automation actions? Would you have wanted automatons themselves withheld until those features had been implemented? I think not.

Keep in mind if it is very important to you to have multiple buttons trigger the same automation, it is still possible to use an Update button to set the value of a hidden helper field, and have that helper field trigger the automation. The main visual difference is that you will not get the pretty “starting” toast that lets you know the automation has been started.

Amazing update!

and also looking forward for this!

Next, please bring dynamic button label in Interface @Emily_Sermons

Just wanted to give a shout-out that this is a great feature! It helps cut down on some hacks we put in place. Thanks! :thumbs_up:

Looks great, but from a UI perspective the button should not change in size when switching to the “Updated” version. The size should be determined by the larger of the two appearances so that only text and color change upon click.

The Automation launch button is great, but the update button is really a game changer! Thank you for these fantastic updates!

@Emily_Sermons - This is a fantastic new feature. I have so many different interface pages for one heavy user group, that I just set up a dashboard with buttons to open the necessary interface page. It looks so much easier for users to navigate!! And color-coded buttons help them visually separate them by function.

This is great! I’ve been building internal tools for small businesses with my team at Underbelly Creative and this really opens up more possibilities. Cheers!

Our team really misses ‘Run automation’ type on Grid buttons. Since Airtable Android app doesn’t support interfaces and extensions, button triggering automation would allow us much more effective flows.