mapping airtable form upload to to a record

That would be significantly more challenging if you want to use the same form URL for all the students to update their own record.

You can definitely use the same form URL if they’re adding new records into Airtable for the very first time, but to update a record in Airtable, you would want to use a different URL for each record.

The best & easiest & quickest way of doing this is to use Fillout’s advanced forms for Airtable,

Fillout is 100% free, and it offers hundreds of features that Airtable’s native forms don’t offer, including the ability to update Airtable records using a form.

Fillout will give you an Airtable formula that generates a unique URL for each student that will enable them to update their own record in Airtable by using Fillout’s “update record form”.

You can see how to set this up in my video below, which also shows off many other advanced techniques using Fillout:

• Using Fillout to create an eSignature approval process with PDF file creation.

Hope this helps! If you’d like to hire the best Airtable consultant to help you with anything Airtable-related, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consultant — ScottWorld

Fillout is great and could certainly be useful to improve this workflow, but you could hack something together with automations that’ll mostly get this done…

Start with two tables, your Student table and your Submissions table, with your Submissions form including a spot for the file upload and a field that matches a field on the student table. It could be name, but nicknames and capitalization differences can create failure here, email is usually best, though it can be anything unique, so phone number or student id# whatever. Then set up an automation where when a form is submitted, Find Records in the student table where the email fields match, and then update the record in the student table with the uploaded document (alternatively you could instead make it link the records and look up the attachment field). 

It’ll require occasional review for if someone mistypes their email address or uses a different one, but should properly associate the records pretty consistently. 

Thank you ​ ​@ScottWorld and ​@DisraeliGears01, I will definitely try both, but I have tried the hack suggested by ​@DisraeliGears01 but doesn't seem to work 

Just whipped together a test and it seemed to work alright, I wonder if the issue is a delay in processing the attachment upload compared to when the automation runs…? 

Anywho, the second option I mentioned should work fine (and probably better for data management purposes) where you make the automation generate a link between the submission and student tables, and then just add a lookup attachment field.

​@DisraeliGears01, let me explain the full scenario of what I am talking about:

I am a credit restore expert,

I have two tables which are client and documents

At the initial stage, an interested client applies through a client form by filling in the necessary information, on submission, the client form is populated with the supplied clients information with an automated thank you message sent to the client.

After then, I will review the client information then I will change the status from *lead* to *onboarding* if the clients meets the requirements. This will send him an automated message asking the client to upload the necessary documents through the form link (created from the document table).

Expectations: I expect the submission of this form to automate the populating of the document table with the uploaded attachments, and information of the clients which should be filled from the clients table.

Now this where the problem lies:

1. Both tables are separate tables (clients and document tables), they need to be connected together.

2. Every clients that submits a form will do so through the same url, which makes it hard to know which clients upload the attachment.

​@Ayiki 

As I mentioned above, the easiest way to do this would be with Fillout's advanced forms for Airtable, which does it all for you.

Everyone can use the EXACT SAME FORM URL when they fill out the very first form. So you can give everybody the exact same URL for the very first form that they fill out.  

But then, in Airtable, when you change the status from “lead” to “onboarding”, your automation will send the client their automated message with their own personalized link to update their own record in Airtable (i.e. upload their documents to their own personalized record).

Check out my video that I linked to above, which shows you how to set this up step-by-step.

Hope this helps!

If you have a budget and you’d like to hire the best Airtable consultant to help you with this or anything else that is Airtable-related, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consultant — ScottWorld

I have watched your linked video, and will definitely give it a trial. Thanks both ​@ScottWorld  and ​@DisraeliGears01 for your contributions.

Hmm, does this look right?  If so I’ve set it up here for you to check out

The idea is that you’ll get the client to key in a unique ID of some sort, probably their email.  The automation then looks for a Client record with the same email and links the Document record together:

And you’ll end up with one record per document with the submission date

Hey ​@Ayiki 

Both solutions above will work! The biggest issue I usually face when asking the end-user to provide input that will be used to match their record (e.g. their emails as a unique value) is that users (i) have typos; and/or (ii) might forget what email they used previously and use a different email by the time they submit the form.

Having said that, I believe you will be better off with (i) one sign-up form, which when submitted (ii) triggers an email to them to a unique (dynamic) URL for an update record Fillout form.

Hope this experience helps! If you need help setting this up, please feel free to schedule a quick call using this link. I’d be happy to help.

Mike, Consultant @ Automatic Nation