Group Form Submissions by Student ID

This is a perfectly fine way of doing things as long as you feel confident that the students will enter their 10 digit IDs in correctly haha.

I’ve done this using emails as the unique identifier. Essentially you have your form/petition table(s) and then have a linked record field to a Student Profile table where each student has their ID# listed (along with whatever other info is useful). 

Then setup an automation where when form is submitted, find records in the Profile table where the ID # = ID# on form. Then create a conditional logic action where if that record list is not empty, update the linked record field in the form submission to the found record in the action. If it is empty, create a new record in the Profile table with that ID #. 

Hey ​@mswest5,

Not exactly what you are looking for, but you might find Deep Match interesting if you want to link the records based on context different to that of their exact unique ID even if they have some typos or differences. 
 

https://automaticnation.com/airtable-deep-match-ai-powered-automatic-record-linking/
 

Mike, Consultant @ Automatic Nation

You can achieve this using the miniExtensions Form’s login feature. It allows you to have a login page where the student would enter their ID, or any other identifier (like an email address, for example, where you could also use email verification). If the ID exists, they would simply see their main record and any linked records you want to show to them. You’d have full control over what’s visible and editable here.

If the ID does not exist you can either have a new record be created automatically (prone to typos, but could still be useful) or forward them to a registration form to create a new profile. It’s super easy to set up and completely free to try out!

​@DisraeliGears01 This is super helpful, thank you so much! I am having some trouble with the automations, would you mind sharing a screenshot/recording of what you are using? 

​@mswest5 On closer review I actually set my version up worse than how I described (it was 18m ago and I’ve learned since then haha) but I can walk you through the implementation…

My trigger is when record is created in the registrations table, as they all come in via form so they’re created with full information. Then a Find action runs to identify in my Contacts table if the name submitted with the form exists as a contact. For you this would be Where “ID” contains “ID” instead of name.

If that list isn’t empty (i.e. it found someone) then in the Contacts table it uses the recID to point at the contact, and associates the contact with a meeting. I’m associating with a 3rd table here, for your use case I’d update the form/petition record with the recID in the find records action. 

For what you want to do, you should add another conditionality, if the list is empty, create a record in the contacts/students table and associate the form/contact. 

Also, you should probably add a 3rd condition where anyone who enters their ID as 67 gets an email expelling them 🤣