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All right. Welcome back to the build-time are podcast. It is good to be back with the crew again, you guys left me solo last week. I was all alone. It's good to have you back.
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But we survived so good to have everybody in. We are in season 24, episode 7 of the build-time are podcast and have an exciting show for you. So before we jump into it last week, there was a big event and Kamille was there Kamille give us a rundown of airspace and how it went
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so airspace away, it was
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a kind of a split event where the focus was AI for the majority of it, but one half of the event, you could do a build with on. So they gave you some prompts in advance. I think there were either four or five different categories that you could compete against and if you want, you gotta cash prize as well as like a WWE style belt. That’s always fun. And then the other half of the event was more like hearing from very different Airtable customers and it’s La. So basically, everyone there was from either a studio or from some sort of music group, so a lot of familiar faces on my end.
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But yeah, there was a lot of focus on using AI natively within airtable as well as a little bit of talk about. If you use say clogged to integrate with airtable and you’re not using Omni directly, they did have a sneak peek of a new airtable product called canvas, which is nice. It’s the it’s like the next level of an interface designer almost where it will.
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Build a full like website, but different from some of the previous generation tools that airtable or are tables. Parent company has released. It allows you to click on items on the page and tweak them directly rather than having to regenerate, the whole canvas all over again. So, it was nice and attendees of the event were
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taking off of the wait list. I’m not sure when more General availability of canvas will be, that part was interesting.
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Actually got taken off the waitlist yesterday and played with it for a couple minutes. So
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Kind of interesting.
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Yeah, we might have it on, maybe a future episode, it looked like it could do.
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Some good things, but it was also really slow. But it also could have been because I was in a room with hundreds of other people all using the internet at once, so yeah.
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Yeah, we might have to do a new episode with it.
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It’s interesting, the approach they’re taking.
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With it. I’m curious how it’ll play out.
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Yeah, they’re
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they have more and
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More products under their belt that are not strictly airtable so you wouldn’t get to Canvas from airtable.com. I don’t think that might just be because it’s still, you know, in a closed beta, maybe it will become more closely integrated with the product or it might be like hebridean, which is its own Standalone item or could be like product Central which is airtable but not really
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Yeah. Yeah this one’s tied more to airtable like to log in. You have to use your airtable login and it automatically
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has access to the bases that you’re logging has access to
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So, yeah, it’s much more tight in where it’s hyper agent. I don’t even think has a connector, it might have a connector there as a connector, but it’s like it’s considered a completely different like login.
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Yeah, so cool. The Keynotes, Howie
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Any highlights from the Keynotes?
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um,
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I mean, yes and no I thought it was a little funny because the beginning was I I just I distinctly remember a play like a short little intro video and it was like it took a generation to build the steam train and it was really harping on the speed of the growth of technology and it was like now let’s talk about AI for about six hours.
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A lot of the presentations towards the beginning, before the sort of Builds on portion, began focused on specifically, recent adjustments that your table is made to their own platform, was support, some use cases and then if you wanted more Deep, dive into what some of those use cases could be, that’s what the second half of the event was for.
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Gotcha cool. Very good. Did they announce if they’re doing another one anytime soon? I thought I saw a similar event on their website but I could be mistaken.
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Yeah, I didn’t see another airspace one because I think they called the one in New York airspace as well. Or is that just
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They they called I’ve seen some recently called Builder base that they’ve been doing and the one in Boston that I’m going to is are you?
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It’s part of Boston Tech week, but it also had a build with airtable AI workflow hackathon.
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So nothing fancy special for the name there, but yeah, Builder base of her.
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Very good. That’s a good update. So yeah, if you anybody out there that went and have any feedback or comments was know how it was for you,
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And they had a Build, A Thon.
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And do you know what the winning application did?
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now I should because I know one of the guys, but
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Can’t say that I do. I’m sure it was impressive.
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Cool.
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Awesome well that to get update. So for today’s show Kamille is going to walk us through a deep dive on forms and automations and how to create
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sub records using native forms.
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With that, let me change our screen up here.
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Let’s go.
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And do you want to share your screen again?
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I get timed out.
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All right, and before I get into it, none of these options are good but I thought it was worth while talking about what your options were if you wanted to do something like this. So again we’re kind of talking about having sub records when you’re submitting a airtable form and I prepared a couple of different versions of things that you could do and the base that we’re in is on a team plan. So basically everyone should be able to do
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All of the following. I also try to think of it from the perspective of are the people feeling out the forms part of your team, or are they external folks? So not having to pay for a license to submit information. There’s pros and cons to each approach. And again, none of them are good, but all of them are somewhat viable. So, the example I have is a pretty basic order form where one order might contain several items and each item might have a very amount of quantity and that’s why you might want to have.
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Sub records, you could capture that nuance and add up the total price of the order and things like that. The rest of my
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base is blank. So if I go to my forms, I have a couple of different forms. I will go through them one at a time.
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and this, the first few demos, because
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They are set up the way that they’re set up, anybody who is not a collaborator in the base, should be able to complete this. So what I’m actually going to do is I’m going to
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Put this form in the chat.
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For.
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Letting me.
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I do this.
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Platform, I’m not used yet. Um, alien Dan if you don’t mind filling out this order form this at the same time I’m doing so you’ll continue to see my screen as I’m doing it. The first sort of idea I had was, you know, one form for the order and you have a second form for your line items. So I haven’t turned on where it knows who you are as you’re feeling out the form and that’s important because when I’m basically saying is, everybody who fills up the form has one cart so I can keep adding more and more products.
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To my cart, as I go that’s one and I can submit another response, maybe I want to hoodie and want ten of those.
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And then all add my last one which is a hat. Maybe I want.
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15 hats. And when I’m done, I can go back to that first form.
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And I can confirm my car. So what this is doing is it’s filtering a list of
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Records that I’ve called carts behind the scenes that are tied to my user account so I can only select my card.
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And I did this because otherwise you can’t really add up the total cost of your order before you submit it. If I did it, a couple of other ways. So, I’m going to hit three products, 9:20. That’s my car. I’m going to hit submit
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and then now that that’s in there,
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After a second or two for my automation to complete.
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You’ll notice that I have three completed orders each with three different line items.
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And here’s what everyone ordered. So, I was able to capture with this method, the quantity, the total price for each of the different products and everybody. Their cart didn’t conflict with anyone else’s even that we know we all ordered from the same limited set of products.
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And the way that kind of works is when you submit a line item record, it creates I have an automation, that creates a cart record, that’s tied to the same user account and it just links the all of the line items together. And when someone submits an order, it finds the cart associated with what you clicked on the form. Because again, you do have to select no way. This is the wrong form. You do have to select the
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The cart that you want to select, so I already know exactly which cart to pick and you can kind of see it working in real time. Here’s my cart, I’m going to submit again.
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And what we should see is that the line items are taking out of my cart and attached to the order.
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If I go back here, you can see my new order with just that one item attached to me, know exactly who to associate with it.
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What that automation looks like is when a form is submitted the cat to cart one. I’m making sure this person who just submitted the form already have a cart if so then just
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Stick this new line item as part of the cart, if not create a cart with that line item, and as long as someone is not rapidly submitting the form. And I think I was going, you know, relatively quickly, I was at as I was creating my line items, it should do this without conflict. It’s a possibility. But the odds that someone is going that fast, that it completes before automation, is relatively slim, unless you have quite a few people filming out the form at once calling that
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and then the second item you need to make this work. Is when you submit an order.
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I’m saying, okay, well, give me all of the carts for this person. Basically the same fine record step and then we are linking. The order that was just submitted to those line items and then for the cart, we’re basically just clearing it out.
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That is option one.
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option two is my least favorite but still technically viable, let’s say that you don’t want to separate forms to do this and you still don’t want
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To pay for licenses, for someone to fill out sub records. What you could do is you could have a form that set up where you have just a long text field and you hope that people fill out their order sheet or whatever you want to call it, in the correct format. And you might have a link to what your product catalog might be.
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So, I can say, if I want to Hoodie, I want that item order and I want eight of those and I want a hat.
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And I also 18 of those, I don’t want to Third Eye items so I would get rid of it.
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so after that submitted, if I go back to my data,
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That’s the new order that I just submitted number 12. I now have two line items. I go to my two line items, my hat, and my hoodie eight items. Each this one I made use of the generate structured data. I’ve done this before using a script that would basically regex match whatever you put in the form. And if it matches the pattern, I’m expecting great. I’d be able to parse it if not, it would just ignore it for this particular demo. I said let’s give the generate structured data prompt a try. So the prompt I gave it was when the form is submit it, parse out the following texturing as an array of items can continue a product ID and quantity Where the product ID and quantity of each item is separated by an X with a space on either side and then you insert that filled the schema that I had at output was an array called items.
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Each item within the item array is an object containing a product ID, which is a string and a quantity, which is a number.
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And then that does, in fact, create an array which means you could use it in conjunction with the repeat action in automations, just a friendly reminder that this Loop or repeated Action Group can work for any array. It does not have to be a fine record step and then from there, I am just creating a record and line items where the order is, the order that submitted the form and then product ID and quantity,
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this is my least favorite specifically because it relies on people kind of
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filling it out in the way that you hope. I’m sure with sort of more thought behind it. You can
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come up with a
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format that you’re expecting people to put into that text box.
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That is really easy for people to.
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you know, work with but
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You know, you you introduce a level of risk there? Well, I wonder. Could you, yeah, what would it take to allow them to like just natural language. So like I want three hats and forth. Well, I mean yes, that I feel like a specifically not using a script and using the like, AI step for this part, you probably could do something with that. But then, if we’re talking about natural language, if I say, I want five hats, but I have more than one type of hat in my catalog, you know, I don’t want to order the wrong item for somebody. So I would recommend some sort of like skew or item id being passed along with it. I went with the record ID because then I could just paste it directly in but, of course, if you had a skew instead you would have looked fine record step here.
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And say, give me the products that has this SKU so I could attached to the order. I wish to like support, what Dan was saying like
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The we now have deep match available as a linked record AI agent type field but we don’t really have the same equivalent in terms of a find records or automation step. So it actually really difficult to like, give it like, find the best match of all of these records while keeping that token.
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They’re small. If that makes sense.
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But I’m looking forward to improvements on that front and you do bring up a good point about token usage.
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The this obviously takes credits to run. Now it doesn’t take a whole lot of credit because it’s not doing a whole lot of things but that is something to consider. If you’re going to go with this approach, especially if you have a much more complicated form than what I was presenting. I kept it absolute bare minimum, there’s no concept of where you shipping it to do. These items need to ship together versus these items. None of that, isn’t there? So, there’s a certain point where if you need even more complexity, the token usage, that you might need at this particular step that will parse out the data. It might get more
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Costly over time. So it’s just, this is really an exercise of like if you had to stay in your table and just use airtable, what could you do? And the reason I’m doing this on the team plan is because some things are significantly easier if you are on business or Enterprise, but there’s no challenges in that.
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So, here I am.
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And I have a third option, but that does require people have and your table editor, license to contribute.
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But I might have just cut them off with someone saying something.
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Know, go for it.
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Great. So option three is an interface based approach where the general idea is similar to the first one. Where here’s my product catalog. I want to mug, and I’m going to add to cart. It’s going to ask me for my quantity. Let’s say, I want six mugs, this is the UI, that is not great, but this is what I just sort of threw together to, you know. Prove the theory for those who are unfamiliar, Los Angeles, just expanded, its a d line for Metro Rail and they’re selling merchandise that says write the date. So
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I’m using that as my example.
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let’s say, I want for hoodies, so
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With that in place. Now I can go to my cart, here are the items in my car and I don’t have an enabled but I could click to edit each of these and say remove from Carter up the quantity here, you know, do whatever I didn’t for this demo.
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If my cart looks great, I’m going to place my order. You have to have at least one field on the form. So here’s the order date.
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And I’m going to hit create and what that should do is similar to the first implementation. It should take all of my things that are in my cart and move them out of the cart and attach them to the order that was created by the form. Now, this is more simplified because unlike using a traditional Airtable form if I wanted to have that like review your items before you submit, I could just go to an interface page to do that. I don’t need to associate them with a record. So I could show it to the users of, like, you will hear your total cost for your car overall. So this implementation doesn’t actually use the cart table. What it just does is it just has line items that are tied to me because it has the created by field, but it doesn’t have an order associated with it.
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We’ll go through the Automation in a second, but here’s every order I’ve done all from today, but this is the one that I just submitted lucky number 13 with 6 and 4 as my quantities.
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And I’ll go really quickly to the last automation. I have in here which is the simplest of the bunch I think, when an order is created,
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Find line items where the created by is the same person who created the order and order is empty. That part is important. We don’t want to associate previous line items with the current order. We want things that are in my cart associated with it,
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And then you just update that order with the list of unlinked line items now you go. So, again, this implementation doesn’t need the cart table that I had in place before.
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Nice.
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I wonder in.
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With the new canva being able to build like your interface.
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How that works? I have I didn’t dig deep enough to know how they’re going to if there’s any hints on how they’re going to do pricing.
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Um, or anything. But yeah, it’ll be curious. Because in theory, you could recreate that interfacing canva and maybe able to get around. I don’t know. I’m sure they’re thinking about that.
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Yeah, I think of the three options that I just went through the interface based approach is the one that I use the most in my day-to-day because in my day-to-day, I am on the Enterprise plan. So we’re paying for the licenses anyway and just get more functionality that way. It is closer to your typical like add to cart experience that you would have on any website and with something like canvas that can replicate or create.
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Basically a regular old website, the UI of it all could be a lot smoother and simpler than what I’ve presented here. This is kind of me.
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Looking at, how can you do it? Using just basic airtable. And then, if you using an interface and depending on, you know, your setup, you could have Omni create a custom extension for your interface. That makes the UI more, you know, straightforward and I’ll say typical
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For the order experience of it all or you could code it yourself a few so chose. But there’s a there’s a couple of additional things that you could do to make the experience a little bit smoother. But from a functionality standpoint it doesn’t really take much under the hood in order to accommodate is generally use case again, still, not great but it could be worse.
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Yeah.
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I really like your first example, I found that really creative I like hadn’t considered that.
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there’s,
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I at first, I was wondering if your, if the direction you were going was you’d pick the line items that you created like individually. But I kind of like how you bundled them up into one cart so you just have to click one button. Yeah going back to that first example, and I’ll just add a couple more. I did it this way because I didn’t. What if you ordered like then you’d have to pick 10 line items and that’s
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Not great and then you still don’t have like, well, what’s my total for the order? You don’t have that if you don’t.
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Bundle it up using that extra cart table and technically speaking. You don’t necessarily have to have this on where they need an airtable account you would have to include like
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Enter your account ID or into your email, as like a field on both of these two forms. The reason I have this turned on to circumvent that is because it just there’s the fewest possible fields that you can include on this one to get it to work.
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Now, going back to complexity.
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This would typically be my subtotal but then there’d be like tax or vat. And then there might be shipping, there might be a couple more things that you might do. So this is
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probably not the total for your order. I haven’t really considered how to
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reconcile, that necessarily
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But again this is the most limited probably of the three approaches but it does kind of get you and relatively few clicks being able to have as many line items as you want.
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Kind of bundled together in one go with this implementation needed to automations to do it but no scripting and no AI.
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I’ve philosophical question curious on your input, so I thought about this quite a bit. I think everybody’s trying to figure out
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where AI fits in with our processes and everything. So I went through this practice of I was interviewing for a position for my for my company and I put together a website, not not on their table, but I wanted to chat widget I wanted to build a chat component using Ai and so, my first version I had these questions of data that I wanted to collect from potential candidates and so I had it all AI generated, so it was like a chat process. So you’re chatting with the AI and then the AI would go through and ask you these questions to collect it and then it would update the database all chapeys. But what I found was people didn’t really like that experience and so I switched it to just being a standard form. It’s like if you know what you’re collecting and you’re like, I want to collect these, you know, questions.
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I was like struggling, like the experience, because I was thinking, like, Cadet table create, you know, an omni form, widget that allowed you to, like, interact with your form via Omni to collect the information. And I don’t, I don’t know if that’s the best approach. Like, there’s still a use case for a standard question and answer forum.
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it’s like,
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where do we fit AI into some of these these tried and true processes making? Can you make
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I I can see a world where someone like makes it custom extension or something. You could just make your own website, whatever that has
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Agentic sort of conversational pattern to collect as much information and then behind the scenes, it’s sort of like it’s categorizing. All the responses as though you were feeling out of form. And then at the end, it gives you a pre-filled form link of like, huge what I’ve gained from this conversation.
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With a pre-filled with maybe many of the fields, like what’s your age? That’s probably easy to prefill. Like what are your goals for this position? That might be a little bit harder like having that pre-filled so,
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Um, it kind of guide someone through, if you had a very long, very complicated, very tedious form. I can see that being of some value because then you still get confirmation of like, yeah, this is what I said, or it kind of misinterpreted question three. I’ll go in and fix it.
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Actually being useful for.
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like if you have something that has like a long essay type answer question or something like and you’re if you’re really looking for specific,
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pieces to be answered of that, like, having AI kind of to help guide the user along be like, don’t forget to
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Add something about this, I don’t know.
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I could see that being someone useful,
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Yeah.
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Yeah, I was just curious. It’s it’s kind of interesting.
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how it’ll be because there are, I think we’ll see you at where people use AI in places where you’re like,
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it’s not the right use case for AI, you know like that’s Overkill or that makes it more complex or complicated.
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And also it’s not free. So I mean,
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If you’re rolling in dough, I guess, right? Have that be but the
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a lot of what I do. I’m kind of looking for efficiency, so if I can get it done with maybe a formula, I’ll just use a formula. Yeah.
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Yeah, that’s where I’m like the matching one.
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Like, that’s what I’m a little hesitant to use the AI and all those places. Maybe it’s a nice to have but
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Is it worth the token usage? And
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very cool.
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All right. Anything else for showing in here?
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Thanks. So I think that’s like the high level of each of the different versions of this, sort of experiment and they all get you to the same place. But the the one I think you’re going to have the most mileage out of is the one that’s building on the interface again that does. In fact
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you know, everybody who needs to feel this out would need a
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An airtable editor license. But again, kind of going back to some exploration you could make
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like a custom interface, either coded yourself or use Omni to do, so that could create all of the line item like records visually, like it won’t store them in the base yet, and then when you’re ready, I could see it going and
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Pre-filing, a form that looks like option. Number two, where all of this, your items box is formatted exactly the way that we think it will, it should be. And then all you have to do is hit submit, so you could kind of marry the two together. If you didn’t want to Grant people edit access, you could kind of merge them together in that way.
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Yeah, I wonder
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I wonder if people are already like going the custom interface route where you could almost, you could even have a list of read only users with like a passport and create like a login inside the custom interface, you know where they
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They enter their email and a passport and then, you know what user they are and that as a cookie or whatever. So like
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You could do it all with rude. Only users, probably not what are table wants, but I think it is possible. Yeah, I mean I I don’t have it releases in interphase extension but for the data layer extensions, my apps you do log in. So you can, I can see whether or not you’re subscribed in my system. So like the the idea of logging into the custom extension directly, that’s not new. And I’m certain that carries over whether you’re doing this or something similar to it or not. And
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yeah, you would, you would know exactly who’s logged in and it is part of Airtables.
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SDK for customer extensions, both for the data later. And for interfaces, even if you don’t have your separate login,
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Component it. As long as you’re logged into airtable to view the interface, whether you have an editor or viewer license, it knows who you are. So you technically don’t have to do anything. You could just say, hi. Whoever you are, and then associate all the actions with
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That email. Yeah, that’s true. Yeah, yeah. So they would log in as a read-only and then you would save it using you know, the admin.
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well, when it, when it, when a customer interface saves, like data to the to a record,
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Is it always as the user interactive? Okay. So editor update. So, what I would be suggesting is that, like imagine everything in this interface was accustomed interface. So you would be adding items to your car.
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and then, what this interface is doing, is it’s creating
[00:36:08]
It’s creating line item records in the base which would require and editor, license. But if it’s a custom extension, these could be just stored in your browser’s memory, and not in the database. So that when you hit place order rather than it being a form, it could send you to a pre-filled form that has all of the information from here, filled in and then you have to submit. So this formed doesn’t require you to have an editor license and just sort of clicking around in a customer. Interface doesn’t require an editor license either. You would be able to sort of
[00:36:48]
Like Build It Up invented. Yeah yeah kind of like build the Json and Export it. Exactly. Yeah. Or or yeah or you could automatically post it to a webhook automation
[00:37:03]
That’s true. Yeah, so you could submit it that way.
[00:37:11]
Yeah, I’m sure somebody’s building it that way. I think that’s a simple enough.
[00:37:17]
idea that I I would want to test it, you know, just because the I probably from a user experience standpoint, I would probably go with the
[00:37:29]
trigger and automation’s web hook.
[00:37:32]
And send it of formatted Json just because then you don’t have to open a new tab and then, you know, there’s no chance of someone, you know, messing this up and all of that. It’s probably just a better user experience for you stay here. But, yeah, there’s a, there’s a couple of things that you could do if you really, really want to circumvent, but then you have to create and maintain a customer extension, which could be good. Could be bad if you’ve never done it before.
[00:38:04]
Yeah, very cool. Awesome. Well, thank you Kamille for showing this very useful.
[00:38:11]
And yeah, let us know how you guys use forms and some of these tricks we love to see them on the show and we will be back next week. Next week. I will be off the grid but we’re gonna make it where chameleon Ali will
[00:38:29]
keep it going the last episode of the season and
[00:38:34]
got other big news, two in two days. My daughter’s getting married. So I’ve got a wedding this week.
[00:38:41]
Thank you. Yes or
[00:38:44]
Adding to the family law here. So yeah, so I’ll be busy rest of this week. And then, and then going off the grid next week. So,
[00:38:55]
Big request.
[00:38:58]
Cool, thank you. And we will see you next week on the show. Have a good week, everyone.
[00:39:05]
Thank you.