Feb 24, 2024 02:27 AM
Hi Everyone,
I've been using Airtable as an event registration platform for several years.
I am seeking assistance in building a new event registration base where the registration form is linked to another Airtable base so that people attending previous events don't need to retype registration data such as email address, company name or pictures. The trigger can be the name of the person.
I am looking forward to hearing from you.
Zoltan
Feb 24, 2024 05:15 AM
Hmm, in the other base do you have a single table where each record represents a single person? If so, you could sync that table to your new base, and have an automation that'll trigger every time a form gets submitted. The automation would then link up the new submission with the person record based on the name, although I would recommend using a more unique identifier like email perhaps
For form submissions where a person with the email can't be found, you could have your automation email them another form link to fill up the other required information, such as the company name and pictures
Feb 24, 2024 05:25 AM - edited Feb 24, 2024 05:35 AM
Sorry, I’m not sure that I fully understand your question. Are you hoping to:
(1) Allow people to view and/or change their own personal information from the form?
or
(2) Are you just looking to automate Airtable for yourself on the backend after they type in their name on the form?
If you’re looking to do #1 — letting people view and/or change their own personal information on a form — this is not natively possible with Airtable’s forms.
Airtable’s forms can’t display lookup fields nor rollup fields nor formula fields on its forms, nor does Airtable offer the ability to view and/or update existing Airtable records from a form.
However, if you want to build all of this into a form — the ability to register for new events, while also showing the person their personal information, while also giving the person the ability to change their own information — you could use Fillout’s advanced forms for Airtable, which natively offers all of these capabilities.
Fillout can display Airtable lookup fields, Airtable rollup fields, Airtable formula fields, and much more. For example, it also supports multi-page forms with conditional paths, it allows updating Airtable records from a form, it can show as many fields that you want to see in a linked record picker, and more.
However, there is one major issue here.
As you may already know, Airtable only lets you lookup data based on a linked record field, but if you provide an editable linked record field on your form, one person will be able to see all the other people in the linked record field. This is not good from a privacy perspective.
So, the master solution to this is that you would want to prefill the linked record field based on a customized unique form link URL that is automatically generated for each person that is already in your base, and then you wouldn’t give your users the ability to modify the linked record field on the form.
All of this functionality is natively built into Fillout, and if only required the customer’s Airtable Record ID. You don’t need to worry about prefilling every field on the form, because that isn’t necessary.
Since Fillout provides conditional pages and multiple-page forms, you would probably want to conditionally go to one page if they are a new registrant (so they could type in their personal information for the very first time), and a different page if they are an existing registrant (so they could view and update their personal information).
However, all of this can be extremely tricky to setup, and it’s probably not the most elegant solution for your customers.
For an even simpler & easier solution to this than using forms — and a solution that provides a superior user experience for your customers — you can create a CUSTOMER PORTAL for your customers, where they can login to the portal, see all of their past events that they have registered for, register for new events, and update their personal information.
A customer portal would work identically for both new and existing customers.
A few of the leading customer portals for Airtable are Noloco, JetAdmin, Softr, and Glide.
Noloco is probably the most powerful & customizable customer portal for Airtable. The CEO of Noloco gave a demonstration of his product on this Airtable podcast episode.
I also give a brief tutorial of Noloco on this Airtable podcast episode.
And I also presented a full one-hour webinar on Noloco called Building a Client Portal on Noloco powered by Airtable.
p.s. All of these solutions can be relatively tricky to setup, so if you have 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 consulting — ScottWorld
Feb 24, 2024 05:34 AM
Many thanks! I will look at Fillout tonight and make some tests. Zoltan
Feb 24, 2024 05:37 AM
@Zoltan_Paksy You’re welcome! You may also want to check out the portals I mentioned above as well, because they might provide a simpler & more powerful user experience for you and your customers. By doing all of this with Fillout, you will have to implement some of the workarounds that I mentioned above. But at least you have a bunch of different paths to explore here.