Assign tags as attributes to a user

Hi there,

I’m creating something similar to an employee directory. I’m starting with the employee directory template. I’d like employees to be able to add attributes to their profile (e.g. favourite travel destinations).

I’m imagining a tag cloud where the employee can select whichever tags are relevant to them, or type in a new one, and then have their profile updated in the Airtable. It doesn’t seem like there is a block that works like this, so I have been trying to find alternative implementations but haven’t found one that works well.

I’ve looked at using a multi-select dropdown as part of a form, however this requires you to manually populate the options (rather than have them populated by the data in Airtable), and doesn’t allow the user to create any new options.

I also considered a list, or a list of checkboxes, but Softr’s paradigm isn’t lining up with the use case for both of these.

Can you recommend a good solution for this use case?

Thanks,

Hi @tom2 and welcome to the community!

As you suspect, there really isn’t a great way to do this in Softr right now.

I would tackle this in two parts. For part 1 I would do the simplest and easiest-to-implement thing that could possibly work. Then I would wait for Softr’s “Forms 2.0” release and take another look at what might have become possible that wasn’t before.

The Simplest Thing That Could Possibly Work™ here is a single line text field with comma delimited tags that the user can edit freeform-style, along with a prompt that suggests the tags to choose from. Yes, this is going to result in some data quality problems that you might have to sort out later, but I would trade that for the ease with which you can get something in there and then move on and come back to it later.

Hi Tom, Welcome !

My approach for the tags cloud would be to list these tags as linked records and hopefully forms 2.0 will let us prompt linked records as options to choose from when editing a record, or when filling out a form, and this is probably to much to ask, but some third party form services will also allow you to add a new record to this ‘linked records field’ if not present what you are looking for.

But either way, we still have to wait a few weeks.

Thanks for the responses. Another post in the forum suggested embedding a form from Airtable, so I’m trying that for now, along with prefilling some data using the method described in this post.

Would there be a simple solution on the Airtable end to break these out into separate rows in a “travel destinations” table, and then link the records (rather than keeping them as text)? I know it’s possible to script something to achieve that, but if I can avoid scripting I’d like to.

The text field approach I described would require an automation. I’m not sure if the automation would require a script, but it seems awfully likely.

Had the same issue.

The approach of adding to the multi-select with an airtable automation works.

Loom

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Hey @cooper,

We have this improvement already planned, cannot mention estimation though.

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