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I have used SOFTR + AirTable to build a project management portal for my customers. The primary purpose of this portal is to have a common place for my customers to enter information that will be used in the video projects we build for them, so my customers must be able to login with a user (client) account. 

When onboarding a customer I need to create 3 records:

  1. The athlete record, which operates like the “company” record in a CRM
  2. The User account record which is a user in the softr platform
  3. The project record which is where the customer work will get done. It is linked to the athlete record and the user account record.

The softr user table is sync’d/linked to a table in airtable called users.  

Generally, I assume it is normal for the softr user accounts (clients) to be created using the softr studio interface. However, since I need to create ALL THREE records each time, I built an admin page in my softr app that contains each of these airtable tables, so I can create the requisite records sequentially on a single page each time I onboard a customer for simplicity 

 

For the most part this all works fine, however, portal users created in using my admin page land into the airtable users table, but do NOT land back into the SOFTR user table UNLESS I manually visit the softr users table within the softr studio interface. I do not need to actually DO anything in the studio other than visit the page and the user will pop into the softr user table.  This is a problem, since the intended goal of the admin page I built was to be able to freely create users via my APP interface without the need of using the SOFTR studio. For example I can do all this onboarding activity using my mobile phone with the my app interface, but I cannot access the studio from a mobile phone (this is a softr design thing) so even if I create the user, the won’t get any invitation until I visit the studio from a computer sometime later. This is simply janky an untenable.

Has anyone else run into this problem and if so how have you fixed it???

ok, so writing out the problem explanation was a bit therapeutic, and made me look at this problem with a different lens. I also went back and review JJ's client portal build series on youtube to understand the how/why the airtable users table exists. I also looked into the users sync settings within the softr studio interface, and saw there was a button to force sync, which I read as "this is not a persistent/consistent sync"

I believe the actual problem lies in the fast that softr expects to be the creation source of  the user records, then sending those records inot the airtable. But I am highjacking this process by inserting the the users straight into the airtable and softr is not "looking" for new entries in it's default sync schedule.

I have remedied this (for now) by creating a zapier automation that creates a new softr user when a new user is added to the airtable.  So now when I enter a user via the softr admin page I created and they land into airtable,   and then zapier creates the user into softr. Then softr sends the email invitation, which was the ACTUAL PROBLEM I was trying to solve all along. 

I have also then visited the softr studio page and have seen the new users that zapier created, which show up a NOT sync'd, but after a few seconds the studio page sync's them and updates them to sync'd 

For now this problem is resolved, but I hate having to relay on a 3rd party automation when there is already native integration between softr and airtable.
 

​@RedwolfSports Kudos for coming back and explaining your solution. That is always great to see!

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