Integrating JotForm field to an Airtable field that is a linked record

[Brite_Admin]

I have an airtable base that has a field linked to another record.  I need a way to populate this field with a field in Jotforms WITHOUT using automation (I have tens of thousands of these records so I can't use automation).

Is there a field type in Jotforms that will populate this field type?

[ScottWorld]

No, that is not possible. You would need to use Make's JotForm integrations to get your data from JotForm into 100% of Airtable's field types.

If you don't want to use Make, then you would need to switch from JotForm to Fillout's advanced forms for Airtable, which has direct integration with 100% of Airtable's fields, and also has hundreds of other advanced features for Airtable that are not available in any other form app.

p.s. If your company has a budget for your project and you’d like to hire an expert Airtable consultant to help you with any of this, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consultant — ScottWorld 

[TheTimeSavingCo]

Hm, I'm confused.  Is it that you want new JotForm submissions that show up in Airtable to be linked appropriately?  If so, existing records would have no effect on that?

Or is it that you have existing records in Airtable and existing JotForm submissions and you want to link them together somehow? 

[Brite_Admin]

Sorry if I am not explaining it well.  Let me step back and explain in case there is a different way of accomplishing what I want.  My 200 JotForms have fields for Name, Quizname, & Team Name, & # of Points. There are other fields but not relevant.

• My Student Airtable has a table for the student, Score,  Quiz Name, & Team Name (linked to the Team Table)
• My team Table has fields for the team name (with 10 predefined team names) and a rollup field to aggregate the scores for all team members. 

Students take a dozen or more quizzes in a competitive setting. I use Airtable to create two leaderboards. the first aggregates the total  Student's scores on all the quizzes.  The second leaderboard aggregates the total score for each team.

My issue is I need to use a rollup field for the team so that I can aggregate the team score. 

From my understanding, I can't use the JotForm-AirTable integration to pass the team name to the linked Team field in my student table.

I know I could use the integration to a text field and then use an automation to copy it to the linked field but that is impractical because I expect 10,000 to 100,000 form entries each month and I can't afford to pay for that many automations.

If you or anyone has way to accomplish this, please let me know.

[ScottWorld]

Like I said above, you would need to do this with either Make's JotForm integrations or switch to Fillout's advanced forms for Airtable. I would compare pricing to see which one would be cheaper for you.

[TheTimeSavingCo]

Ahh, I see!  Hmm...if you're on a paid plan and you don't need the links to be made immediately you could try
creating an automation that'll run every ten minutes that'll look for unlinked records and link them up for you via a repeating group?  That'd take 24 hours * 60 minutes * 30 days / 10 minutes = 4320 automation runs

The main reason you'd want it to run every ten minutes is because the "Find Record" action you'd be using only finds 100 records at a time, and so if there were say, 250 unlinked records, it would take half an hour for them all to get linked

You could also use a script to handle this, bypassing the 100 record limit, and the idea is the same: Have an automation that runs every ten minutes and its action will be to run the script.  There'd still be up to ten minutes of wait time between a submission and it getting linked though

When you say 200 JotForms, you've created 200 separate forms on JotForm?

[Brite_Admin]

Thanks for your suggestions. I do have several hundred different JotForms. I can't use automations because I can't afford the potential hundreds of thousands of monthly entries as we scale up.  I can't use Make, Zapier, etc. because I need the forms to propagate into a leaderboard in real-time (can't wait 1-10 minutes as these integration programs require. 

I am concluding there is NO solution to my issue so I am exploring creating a custom integration; More expensive upfront but feasible given my needs.

[TheTimeSavingCo]

Ah yeah...real time is a problem

Hmm, you could potentially still use Make / Zapier to do this in real time by making your JotForms do a webhook on submit maybe?