Conditional form fields
  • 06 Jul 2022
  • 3 Minutes to read
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Conditional form fields

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Article Summary

Conditional form fields allow you to show fields in a form view based on the form submitter's values for previous fields. Fields with conditions are hidden until those conditions are met, meaning that those filling out your form will not be presented with unnecessary fields so they can complete the form more quickly. If you have many similar forms for different teams or stages in your process, you could use conditional form fields to create one form that adapts to each selected team or project stage.

Adding conditions to form fields

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This feature is currently only available on a desktop browser or desktop app version of Airtable.

Each field in a form can have conditions, or condition groups, determine when that field will be visible. If you are not familiar with creating conditions to filter views, we recommend reading this support article to learn more about conditions before continuing. Creating conditions for a form's inputs works just the same way as creating conditions for filtering views.

Conditional form fields are hidden by default. Conditional form fields will only appear when the form submitter's input values in a previous field, or fields, meet the conditions set on that conditional field. The whole process happens without taking the form submitter to a separate page or section.

To add conditions to a form field, click on the field to view the display settings. The "Show field only when conditions are met" option will be toggled off by default.

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When you toggle on that option, you can add a new condition by choosing the field, operator, and comparison value. Which operators and comparisons options are available are determined by the field type you select for that condition.

For example, you may want only to add details to a form if the kickoff date for a new event will be within the following year. The "Kickoff date" is the field we want to check; we'll use the "is within" operator, and "the next year" as the comparison value.

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A field can only be used in a condition if it comes before the field you are configuring with the condition.

You can combine conditions together with conjunctions ("and" & "or") to make a condition group. In the below condition group, we have now combined two conditions:

  1. "[The Kickoff date] [is within] [the next year]" AND
  2. "[Name] [is not empty]"

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You can also use conjunctions to combine condition groups with other condition groups. Read this support article on advanced filtering to learn more about how to create, connect, and nest conditional groups as shown below:

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Once you've set up your form field with a condition, you'll see an indicator above it, letting you know at a glance which fields on your form have conditions.

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A conditional field can also be used as the field for another condition on the same form. This gives you the ability to daisy chain conditions to make a customized form experience for the person filling out the form. Here is an example of creating a form where each field will only be visible if the previous field is not empty.

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Notice above how each field appears in the form as soon as the previous form field has a value.

Note that if a conditional form field is required, it is hidden by default until its condition is met. Once its condition is met, the form will still require that field to be filled out before allowing the form's submission.

Invalid conditions

When a form field has an invalid condition, a notification will appear above the field.

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When the field is expanded to view the display options, the invalid field will have a warning symbol next to it. You can hover over the warning symbol to see more details about the invalid condition.

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A field may be invalid because of any of the following reasons:

  1. One of the field's conditions depends on a field that appears after itself on the form. This may occur if you change the field order in the form.
  2. One of the field's conditions depends on a field that is hidden on the
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  3. The condition is missing a comparison value.

When a field has invalid conditions, the form will ignore the conditions, and the field will be visible on the form.

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Currently, there is a hard limit of 50 conditions per question/form field.


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