An order with its line items, or a project with its tasks, is really several connected records wearing the disguise of one intake. Air Fill lets a single submission stand up the main record and attach the related records to it, so what lands in your base is already joined instead of a pile you connect later. The person filling it out moves through once, and you skip the sorting afterward.
What Airtable’s forms do here, and where they stop
Airtable’s own form view is genuinely good at what it’s scoped to. Each time someone submits, Airtable adds one new record to the single table the form is connected to, and when a field on that table links to another table, the form lets the respondent pick from records that already exist there. That covers a lot of everyday intake cleanly.
Where it stops is the case where one submission needs to produce more than a single row. A quote with five line items, or an event registration that signs up a household of four, is one submission in a respondent’s mind but several related records in the base. As Airtable’s own guidance puts it, the form alone can’t create those several linked rows in a single submission. There is also no native way, as of writing, to chain a series of forms into one guided session that carries someone from one step to the next and keeps their place along the way. For larger internal workflows Airtable points you toward Interface Designer or toward automations that build the linked records after a submission lands, and those are capable tools in their own right. They are simply a different job than handing one respondent a single continuous flow and getting connected records back.
The workaround, and why it wears thin
So teams stitch the flow together themselves. A common route is to share one form for the parent record and a second form for the line items, then ask people to submit the first, follow a link to the second, and keep filling until every item is in. Another is to let a submission land and have an automation fan it out into linked child records behind the scenes. Both approaches work, and plenty of bases run on them every day.
The cost shows up in the seams. Whoever is filling the forms has to know how many rounds there are and track their own place by hand, and a long intake broken into separate links is exactly the kind of thing people start and don’t finish. When a respondent closes the tab after the parent form and never opens the second one, you are left with half a record and no easy way to know it. On your side, a set of separate submissions arrives that you then match up and connect, confirming that line item three really belongs to order one before anything downstream can trust the data. The more related records an intake touches, the more of that quiet bookkeeping lands on a person, and the more room there is for a link to go to the wrong parent. None of it is hard on its own. It just never really ends, and it grows with every table the intake reaches.
How Air Fill keeps it in one flow
Air Fill is an independent, native iOS app for building forms on top of your Airtable bases, and it treats a connected intake as one piece of work rather than a chain of tasks to reassemble. Today, a single submission creates the record and attaches its linked records at the same time. The linked-record field opens a searchable picker right inside the form, with server-side search so it stays fast even against a large linked table, and the person filling the form connects the related records as they go. Everything is joined the moment they tap submit, with no second form to chase and no cleanup automation running afterward to sort out what belongs to what.
Two further pieces are in development that carry the same idea further, and we will keep saying so plainly until they ship. The first runs a set of forms as one guided session, so an intake that genuinely spans several related records moves as one continuous flow for the person filling it, with their place kept for them from step to step instead of tracked by hand. When they reach the end, the whole set arrives together and already connected, which is the part that removes the half-finished records and the manual matching at once. The second sends people straight to the pages that apply to them, so the form shows the steps that fit their earlier answers and quietly leaves out the ones that don’t. Someone ordering a single item never wades through the fields meant for a bulk order, and a new customer never lands on the section written for returning ones. Both of these are being built now rather than available today, and the page will change to present tense the day they land.
The relief is in what you stop doing. A multi-record intake stops being a sequence of forms to hand out and a reconciliation chore to work through afterward, and becomes one pass that leaves your base connected and ready to use. The person filling it out follows a single thread from start to finish, and the shape of the data you get back matches the shape of the thing you were actually collecting.
How Air Fill fixes this
- Run a set of forms as one guided session In development Line up the forms an intake needs and run them in order, carrying the work forward from one to the next.
- Create a record and its linked records in one submit One form can create a parent record and the linked children that belong to it, across several tables, in a single submit.
- Send people straight to the pages that apply In development An answer can jump the form ahead to the right page, or straight to the finish, so no one pages through questions meant for someone else.
