Student Sign-in & Sign-Out. Who's not signed out?

[Timothy_Chakos]

Hello all,
I have created a base with 2 tables. Table 1 is the Sign In Table. It is fed from a form as I cannot allow students access to the table. Also, due to HIPAA, I cannot allow a list of their names to appear in the sign in form. This means they have to type in their names manually every time they sign in. This leads to typos, errors, irregular spelling, etc. All in all, it is sloppy. The form is updated every day with fresh typing and fresh errors as we cannot have folks viewing other names.

I also have a sign out form that feeds to Table 2. The same issue happens about typing & new dates equals new input & new errors.

I am relying on the hope that they can get their birthday typed in correctly so I have something I can work with which will appear in both tables.

Here’s what I need: A way to see who has signed in but not yet signed out. Due to variations in poor typing, I cannot trust anything they type into the form so am hoping the birthday has the best consistency as it uses a calendar for clicking on to get an exact date correct. So my hope is that we can link via the birthdate, but am willing to create other hidden fields if they can make this happen. I am thinking some sort of compare field.

How can I create a table/view/miracle to see who has not signed out? (Sorry, I can’t do a screenshot of the tables due to HIPAA.

Thank you.

[Vivid-Squid]

Hi @Timothy_Chakos ,
Airtable forms now let you hide information and send information in the URL of the form. You could create a unique link for each user that automatically inserts their name into the Form, this field can be hidden from the user but will populate the Base as you would expect if they just typed it (without typos).
Depending on how many users there are this could become an exercise in management of the links, Airtable can automatically format the links for you and email the user their unique link. If you are still concerned about names in the URL, you can create a unique code for each name and use that instead, obfuscating the data in the URL.

[Timothy_Chakos]

Hi,
I thank you for the prompt reply. Your suggestion won’t work. We have up to 300 people signing in each day. Trying to get each one to type in a URL is worse than what we have now. I am reviewing the data for 24 hours & am finding that these folks cannot even input their DOB. One student has 3 different birthdates input to my base.

[Vivid-Squid]

I see the challenge. Just to be clear the user would not be expected to type a URL, they would click on it from a link in an email. That link will be unique to each user.

What would you do if there are two people with the same DOB?

[Timothy_Chakos]

300 URLs won’t work. I also asked supervisor, can’t we just create ID cards with barcodes? Zap and go! He said no, as some of our students are here for a single day, others for 9 months. There is no easy way to do it.

Additionally, Airtable sees capital and lowercase as unique, so sometimes they use caps, lowercase, or a random mix. My nightmare! I can force caps through Airtable’s abilities, but not much else.

Yes, you see my dilemma. Duplicate birthdays = further disaster.

Thank you.

[Vivid-Squid]

Do the students have any other non HIPAA protected form of ID that is unique, like email or student ID?

[Timothy_Chakos]

Sadly, no. I’ve looked into – hence the desire to create a barcode Student ID. Thank you for your efforts though.