How to send form data to Airtable
Here, we will go through the process of creating a form within a Softr app and linking it to an Airtable base to collect form submissions there. We will create a job posting form, where users will be able to submit job announcements along with all the necessary fields such as description, location, type, and others.
See below a quick video tutorial or continue reading for a detailed breakdown of each step.
To add a form, we need to add a new block, selecting “Form” from the left sidebar and choosing one of the available layouts (e.g. “Sales form”).
Now, let’s customize the form to include all the fields necessary for our job postings. In our example, those include such fields as Company Name, Logo, Job Description, and so on.
For each field you need to select a relevant Type. For fields that require the user to type in the value, you can choose Single line text or Long Text (suitable for the Job Description field in our example). For the fields that require uploading a file (e.g. Logo), we will select the File type, and for the fields that are going to have a predefined list of options to choose from, we are going to set the type as Dropdown. For Dropdown fields we are going to add all the available options inside Options separated by a semicolon. In the screenshot below you can see the job category field with its options.
Apart from the field type, we can also add a Label and Placeholder text. Further on, we need to pay particular attention to the Tag field, which will be referred to while mapping the form fields to our Airtable base. Therefore, the field’s tag needs to match exactly the corresponding field name in the Airtable base. Below, you can see some of the form fields that are already configured.
Lastly, each field has a More menu, where you can set if the field is a required one or not.
Finally, we are going to configure the Submit button to specify where the form is going to be submitted. Here we can define the button Text and Action. Under the Action list, we have multiple options for submitting the form. Since we want to link our form to Airtable, we are going to choose the Send to Airtable option.
After choosing the Send to Airtable option, we also need to provide the URL of the Airtable base that should be linked to our form. Let's see how the base should be configured and linked.
In our Airtable base, the fields (base columns) need to correspond to the form fields in the Softr app. The column name needs to be the same as the field’s tag within the form, and their types need to match as well. In Airtable, we have similar field types:
Single line text
Long text
Attachment (corresponds to File in the form)
Single select/Multiple select (correspond to Dropdown in the form)
In the following screenshot, you can see the “Category” field along with its field type and available options.
Thus, as soon as we have our Airtable base ready, we can proceed with linking it to our form. First of all, we need to provide the URL of the Airtable base (instructions available here) inside the Airtable field.
Apart from that, we need to get the Airtable API key from our Airtable account (instructions available here) and add it in Settings => Integrations => Airtable as shown in the screenshot below.
That’s it. Our form is ready, and all we need to do is to publish it and do a test submission. If the test is successful, a new row with the form submission should be added in the Airtable base. Below, you can see the test data filled in inside the form and how it looks after being submitted to Airtable.
