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how to have a form be able to create a record in 2 different tables?

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ydoc
5 - Automation Enthusiast
5 - Automation Enthusiast

I have just started working in airtable and want to make a base for my highschools National honor society to start up a virtual online tutoring service but I am having problems with designing the forms for submission. Currently I have a tutoring sessions table, students table and tutor tables. I want to make a form that allows a student to input their name and email that will go as a record in the student table then link itself to a record in the tutoring sessions table that will have the date and time they want the session that the student will also input in the same form. Is this possible? Also I need some help on designing a way to make it so that existing students don't have to input their name for every form submission and just find it since we already have their names so I can do better tracking on the data. How could I do that as well?

 
1 Reply 1

Hmm, I think I'd:
1. Have a form that submits into the "Tutoring Sessions" table, with the tutoring session data as well as the student data
2. The form submission will then trigger an automation that will look for a record in the "Students" table with the same data.
  - You'd want to use a unique ID or something here, maybe their email address or some other unique ID, that you'd get them to key in to the original form
3. If it found a record in the Students table, then it'd link it together.  If it doesn't, then it'd create a new record in the Students table and link them together, and we'd use conditional logic for this

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For the second bit, you could make it so that students that have never submitted this form are requested to key in all their student data, but if they have submitted it before then they'd just need to key in their unique identifier (i.e. email or something) so that the automation could run

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I was thinking you could try using Fillout.com (https://www.fillout.com/) for this as it lets users create linked records, i.e. the students could create a student record for themselves if one didn't already exist.  It feels like there might be a privacy issue as the linked field would display all the available student records though.  We could get around this if the unique identifier is like a student number of some sort, but that might still be a privacy issue?