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I run a nonprofit that runs mentoring programs. I have a table that has a unique ID per mentor/mentee (a list of letters and numbers). That is the primary field. Their names are then in another field. There are about 72 people engaged in the program.

I want them to be able to fill out a form for their mentoring activities/hours per month. I’ve created a new table, where the primary field is autogenerated. I’ve created the form, but I’d like for them to be able to choose their name from a list on the form so that it connects automatically to the main table and shows how many hours, meetings, etc for each person.

Unfortunately I can only add the ID linked record for them to choose from, which is an internal number that they don’t know. Any creative thoughts on how I can get them to choose their name and have it still link/connect?

Screenshot of Form. Add participant=Unique ID right now
Screenshot of Activity Table
Screenshot of Main Table (Active Participants)

 

Right off the bat it’s worth pointing out that primary fields in Airtable don’t need to be unique, as Airtable generates a unique record ID in the background that you can use in automations or expose via formula field. So the Name field could just be switched to the primary field for this table as long as you don’t need the unique formula for some other reason (and you don’t have like 4 John Smiths that would get confused). 

Another thing worth pointing out is the perpetual refrain on here Try Fillout Forms as they integrate extremely tightly with Airtable and offer a lot more flexibility. You can specify fields to search by in linked record connections in Fillout (just checked on one of my forms). 

Agree with the above comment! Additionally, in these situations what we typically favor is turning the primary field into a formula that displays something like {Name} & ‘ (‘ & {autonumber} & ‘)’. This allows the name to be in the primary field but can help prevent confusion in the case that 2 people share the same name. I also recommend trimming the name in the primary because if you’ve got leading spaces it can cause automation issues!

This is originally copied and pasted from our platform’s relational database, so all of the tables are tied together by that unique ID in the main table. We’re currently still in beta with the platform, so I had to recreate it in Airtable to do various things that aren’t ready on it yet 😅 It’s been very useful to show the dev team the functionality I’d love to have though!! Perhaps Airtable should do the same with Fillout Forms :D

HOWEVER I did just change the primary field to the name and it didn’t break everything as I had expected! Not sure why but I’ll take the win!

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