Pre-filling Form with multiple values for 1 field OR How to use a Button URL to open multiple forms

Ask the community Formulas
#1

Hi All,
New user (doing pro-bono work for a small edu business) so not too familiar with this but have read all the ‘form’, ‘pre-fill’ and ‘button’ articles here and around 60+ community topics to try to work this out.

  • Teachers giving feedback/assessments on the students in their course.
  • Students table, Courses table and the Assessments table linking them with all the questions etc
  • Because of Airtable pricing, I need the teachers to use a Form to enter the assessments and I’m looking to automate the ‘listing of the students in their course’. So, ideally a picklist from the student names in the record cell.

I have a form where they add the Course-ID and then enter the Student Name. With 10 students in a course they have to do this same step 10 times so I’d like to prefill. I can do the course ID ok but not do the Student name (because it’s multiple names).

Q: I’m now trying to use a button to open the form prefilled but would be happy with the button opening 10 forms at the same time (all with one of the student names selected). Can this be done?
The form they see:

form1
form1595×593 25.6 KB
or https://prnt.sc/uz89ja

The Button/table (with the real linked name field and a testing field just as name strings): table1 or https://prnt.sc/uz8ng2

My Button formula attempt:
“https://airtable.com/xxx?prefill_Course%20assessed=”&{Course Identifier}&"&prefill_Student%20Name="&ENCODE_URL_COMPONENT({Members in Course})

As I said, I can get it filled with course id and ONE student name but if there is more than one student it’s a no-go. Just looking for any ideas how to solve either with formula, field workarounds, automation or apps. Any hints appreciated.

Thank you. Frank

#2

You cannot have a singe button that prefills a form 10 different ways.

How are your teachers accessing the button? Is it in a shared grid view? Can you share the grid view of a junction table that has one button per student per class?

If there is limited budget, you could also look third party portals like Stacker or MiniExtensions.

#3

Hi,
thanks for looking at it. At the moment that button is not live but it is on the shared grid view on the Courses table (for me to test) and not the Assessment table (as the Assessment table only has assessments already done).
There is no junction table that has one button per student per class. I’ve got the button in the record / row that has the course and the linked student field (usually 10 people per course) in it. I suppose I could create 10 new fields and iterate the students from the 1 field where they are all listed into 10 different fields somehow and then have ten fields with a button each but that seems quite messy.
Was hoping there was a way to either display all ten student names in the form at click time for the teacher to pick one from (and the teacher having to do it ten times to assess all) or for the button formula to count through and open 1 form per student name from the same field.
I understand that the form itself can’t assess the 2nd (student field) content when the first (course) field get’s filled as the submit of the form hasn’t happened at that point but I had hoped that some way of creating 10 buttons or 10 forms was easier than having a teacher to type / select names from a list 10 times.

As to the budget comment - imho Airtable is crazy to not have a low access / usage component in the pricing model… every teacher of ours needs write access 4 times a year at term end for 30min or so and I can’t see anyone thinking that 2 hours of write access justifies an annual license (but to their credit, they do have edu and non-profit discounts so for bigger entities that may be ok). (and Mini-extensions suffers from the same pricing issue - no good for small non-profits etc who just need one of their many cool products (but a good deal for busy companies and ‘normal/big users’)).

Thanks

#4

If you are sharing a grid view, you can use a formula field to build up the ten prefilled urls for all of the students. It would be a bit ugly because it would display the actual urls instead of pretty buttons, but you could get all ten prefilled links. The formula would also be a bit complex.

#5

I did a quick demo copy to illustrate… Helping others with DB design without seeing it must be one of the hardest things to do… appreciate all the experts and volunteers here.

My Courses grid view has 3 Open Form buttons. The middle one opens a form prefilled correctly (because it’s only 1 student). I’d someone like the other buttons to do the same in some way.

thanks

#6

Thank you for the demo.

However, the fact remains that a single Airtable button field cannot open multiple urls with different prefilled values. Each button can only open a single url–the one calculated by its formula. The button cannot create multiple urls for a single record. Plus, in general, people don’t like it when clicking a single button opens up a multitude of tabs/windows.

There are workarounds where you can generate multiple links for a single record, but they won’t be button fields. There may also be other complex workarounds that change the prefill depending on which assessments have been already submitted. However, those workarounds would require more info about the structure of your base, and may require additional change to the base. Plus, if you have no budget at all, those complex workarounds may be too expensive to implement.

I’m sorry that this is not the answer you are looking for.

#7

Thanks for your assistance. I’m assessing some workarounds with different views on the other tables (pretty close already - just struggling with getting a couple of field value from another table in a usable format).
Something for the weekend I guess. And if it doesn’t work then budget needs to be checked…