Joshua's Thoughts

If you have a question about QuickBase, the use of the api in particular, please ask in the comments of this post. I will update this blog post to include your question and my answer so that others who come across my site can see it. Many of you have been emailing me GREAT questions that I would love to share with the rest of the QuickBase community.

Any questions about QuickBase are open game, but my speciality is with the QuickBase API. If I don’t know the answer, I’ll find it and/or get you in touch with someone who can.

This is not an official alternative to contacting our support at http://quickbase.intuit.com/support/. You should still contact our support team if you have any urgent or business-critical inquiries.

1. Question: I have a custom form, created with the QuickBase custom form wizard, which anyone can use to add a new record to my table in my QuickBase application.

   Ideally, though, I would like users to be able to edit existing records with the form. Unfortunately, I have only found commands that point the form to edit existing records. Is there anyway this form can edit the form if some of the fields match? E.g. The name field in the existing record is ‘Joey’. When the user enters ‘Joey’ into the form, it would automatically point the edited record to edit the entire record that includes ‘Joey’ in the name field.

Answer: In order to do this, you would need to invoke either javascript or process the form via a backend script (like PHP) to handle the logic of whether or not to do an add_record or an edit_record.

I’d recommend you host the form yourself on your company’s website (if you aren’t already) and use the api for processing the form. Doing this gives you more flexibility in what you can do with the data that is submitted and what records are affected.