Soliguide form view and edition

Update site page
Preview site page

Inspiration

Solinum is a French NGO dedicated to creating innovative project and reducing homelessness. Soliguide is an online guide that lists and maps all the basic necessities and support programs that homeless and vulnerable people need : food, hygiene, healthcare, administrative support, language courses… The point is to centralize in one easy-access platform data that is clear, accurate and quickly updated. In order to keep the high quality of it, we use a mix of user submitted info and human moderation. This is where Airtable comes in handy for us: we use it as a CRM to follow up on the quality of our data and store extra information like personal phone numbers or email of people in charge of the services we reference.

Why build a custom block

Up until now, area managers had to maintain two different bases: our platform with the publicly shared information and their Airtable base with the same information and additional contact information and quality indicators. This was not only time consuming and creating inconsistencies, it also created conflict for different functionalities we want to implement going forward.

What it does

We decided to create this custom block to improve the operational teams’ work process by linking our platform view and edit pages to the corresponding record in the Airtable base. Thanks to this block, area managers can automatically preview our website display in the Airtable block as they consult or edit a specific record, whereas before they had to open several tabs and switch back and forth every time.

How I built it

Using the API documentation I modified the HTML preview block template to adapt it to our tables and customized the URLs to load in the preview block.

Challenges I ran into

Understanding the cursor API wasn’t easy, but luckily the available custom block template helped me better understand how it works and how to use it.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Technically the block isn’t very complex, but the improvement it represents for my colleagues in their daily work really makes me proud and glad that Airtable is so customizable !

What I learned

I discovered the custom block API and how it can be usfull to expand our use of Airtable. The get started is really nicely done, the setup and deployment are really quick and I know I will use it for another usecase soon.

What's next for Soliguide form view and edition

We are currently developing a user interface for organizations that are listed on our platform to be able to manage and update their information in autonomy. The new block will greatly simplify the moderating process for this new feature. Later on, we also want to allow access to the contact information for a restricted number of users according to their area of action and the link to Airtable will make it easier to include the contact information we recorded there.