Update Existing Records with Airtable Forms

Use an Airtable Form to edit existing records. A simple solution that doesn't require a complex workflow.

Airtable Form, Deprecated, Editor

💡Update

While this is still available as a standalone automation, our miniExtensions Form covers this, and many other use cases. It has major improvements in the overall user experience. Go check it out!

Take me there!

This automation generates a unique URL for every record in your table. When one of those links is clicked, it’ll open an Airtable Form that’s prefilled with the record data. The user can then modify/update whatever they like. When they click submit, that record on Airtable will get instantly updated (and the submitted record gets deleted). It all happens behind the scenes automatically without leaving a trace of the form submissions.

💡This automation is ideal if you don’t want to rebuild your existing Airtable form from scratch. If rebuilding the form is no major hurdle for you, we recommend using our miniExtensions Form instead, as it provides far superior functionality!

Features

Can build multiple forms (could be in different tables/bases).
The ability to limit which fields can be edited.
Fields are pre-populated with the existing data before editing.
Records are updated instantly after form submission.
Doesn’t require other 3rd party integrations (e.g. Zapier/Make/n8n)
The form requires minimal setup (no need to set up another table nor map multiple fields/select options)
Supports limiting linked record selection to a view.
Ability to redirect users to a custom page after the record is updated. (e.g. your website)

Limitations

Require using Airtable Form redirect URL and having a ‘Record ID’ field. The “Record ID” field is then hidden from the form when editing.
Attachments: the automation allows adding new attachments to a field, but doesn’t allow removing existing ones.
Auto-number/Airtable automations: the automation requires creating a temporary record, which would affect the auto-number field’s sequential order. The temporary record could also trigger an Airtable automation, if set up. So if your workflow relies on either of these features, our other extension ‘miniExtensions Form‘ would be a better option for you.

After I submit the form a new record is created, but the original one is not updated.

Possible reasons:
1. The form redirect URL is incorrect. Double-check it.
2. The ‘Record to update’ field has limited field permissions. Make sure to keep it ‘Editors and up’.
3. The ‘Record to update’ field is not included in the form.

I’m being taken to the wrong form. What’s going on?

All you need is to double-check:
1. The form URL on the automation settings page.
2. The formula field in the table itself.
3. The formula-redirect URL.
What most likely is happening is that one of these three things is incorrect.

I see duplicate records and older ones are not being removed, why?

There are two ways that this can happen: a user did not wait for the redirect to happen after the Airtable form, or an error occurred during the redirect. In the second case, the error would be clearly shown to the user, so they would know that the record was not updated. However, the first case is more likely what’s going on.

Unfortunately, Airtable takes a few seconds before redirecting, and if someone closes the page while that’s happening, then the user never actually makes it to miniExtensions, so we wouldn’t know that a record was just created.