You can use our Interface's Search Page feature for this. The search page allows you to define one field in your table that users can search by. The search will only return exact matches. Once the search is performed, users can interact with the data as per the table's configuration (e.g. create, view and/or edit records).
Please note that this is not a security mechanism. Anybody can enter anything in the search term and if it matches, they will have access to the matching records. If you require a higher level of security, our Portal is a much better option, as it provides full user authentication and access restrictions.
To set this up, go to:
Your Interface's settings page
Select your table
Search Page section
Turn on Search Page
Select the Search Field
Now, any time a user accesses this table, a search box will appear before the actual table is loaded. The user would need to perform a search and any records that match their input exactly will then be displayed. This search ignores all other filters, so the search is always performed across the entire table.
You can also provide the search term as part of the interface's URL, by appending
?search_FieldName=SearchTerm
to the URL, where FieldName is the name of the search field, and SearchTerm is the search term to filter records by.
This can be used to construct a formula that will generate dynamic links for different users or user groups, e.g. to filter by department.
Any special characters in the field name or search term need to be encoded properly, e.g. using Airtable's ENCODE_URL_COMPONENT() function.