Creating a complicated form.. sync? Link to another record?

Welcome to the community, @Sydney_Dunn!

How are your tables in Airtable currently setup?

I’m envisioning in my head that you have a “Parents” table and a “Kids” table, where each parent record is linked to multiple kids in the kids table?

This is pretty tricky to do with Airtable’s built-in forms. Other threads in this forum have documented some tricks for handling this sort of a scenario.

One trick involves starting with a form for the parents (based on the “Parents” table), and then after the form is submitted, redirecting the parent to a kids form (based on the “Kids” table) — and they would keep resubmitting this kids form over & over again for each child. And, it would require the parents to keep using the same identifying piece of information on each subsequent form (such as their email address on each form). Then, after the forms are submitted, you would use automations afterwards to link the children to the parent record by using the identifying piece of information (e.g. the email address).

Alternatively, if you want to limit the maximum number of kids that can be registered for any particular family, it becomes “slightly” easier, although it does clutter up your Parents table. In that situation, you could potentially do this all with one form (based on the “Parents” table) by repeating the kids’ demographic fields over & over & over again on your form (up to the maximum number of kids that you think a family would have), and you could even use conditional fields to hide the fields that you don’t need to see. Then, after the form is submitted, all of your data would end up in one gigantic record in the “Parents” table, and you could use automations to parse out the individual kids into the Kids table and keep them linked to the right Parent record.

However, probably the easiest & quickest & cleanest way of doing this would be to pay extra $$ for a MiniExtensions subscription and use their form, which allows you to add an unlimited number of linked records directly on the form itself:

A slightly more advanced way of doing this — but the most powerful & most customizable way of handling this — would be to build your own custom form in a tool like JotForm or TypeForm, and then use an automation tool like Integromat or Zapier to handle all the logic of parsing out the data into the appropriate tables & fields. (I prefer Integromat over Zapier, because it’s much cheaper & much more customizable.)

p.s. I am a professional Airtable consultant and an Integromat Partner, and the Integromat link contains my personal referral code. If you have a budget for your project and you’d like to hire an expert consultant to help, please feel free to contact me through my website at ScottWorld.com.