With miniExtensions form, you have the choice to allow prefilling any field, including hidden ones. You can use this feature to send out forms with some prefilled IDs, for instance, without visually showing them in the form. It works by using the prefill_fieldName=parameter
. Our form prefilling function works in the same way it does on Airtable Form. Go here for more details.
Use Cases
This extension can be useful in a lot of scenarios. You can use it for:
- Assign unique IDs for participants
- Segment participants in different groups
💡 Update
We added an auto-submit option to go along with this feature. You can now click on a link to update a record instantly. For example, send “Click here to Confirm” in an email and it instantly updates a field’s status to “checked” (without the user seeing a form, just a success message)
Demo
Here’s an example for a form with some prefilled hidden fields. After you submit this form, the Source
field (which is hidden) would be auto-filled with the word “Twitter”. You can check the results in the view below.
1. URL
The full URL in the demo above is:https://web.miniextensions.com/lRRNiT4ZomfQVhxzpjUX?prefill_Source=Twitter
2. Embed on your site
The form can be both shared as a URL or embedded in your website.
If you click on the sample view below, you’ll see the table that’s used for the demo above.
I’m not sure what I’m doing wrong. The form information is updating the records. By the prefill field is not. Any ideas?
The correct URL should be:
When I submit the form, the prefilled field is not set. Can you help me understand why?
The issue there is that editing is disabled for the prefilled field. Prefilling is a form of editing, that’s why it is not allowed. To achieve what you want, you need to remove the prefilled field from your form, and then enable prefilling hidden fields for the form.
Is there any way to still display the prefilled field even if it is hidden?
Showing a pre-filled value in the form from a hidden field is not possible currently.
The prefill is not filling in on the Airtable base.
If you disable editing for a field, we completely prohibit any edits whatsoever to that field. If you prefill a field, you are in effect editing that field, so that’s why our system blocks the edit.
If you’d like to completely make it impossible to change the value, then you can try removing the field from your form, and then enable the following option in the form: “Allow Prefilling Hidden Fields”. This would remove the field from the UI, but still save that value in Airtable when the user submits the form.