What is the best way to create user accounts for records (people) across bases?

[Danny_McBride]

Hello!

Since 2018, I have been running the registration system for an annual week-long conference using Airtable. So far, each year of the program has been run out of a separate Airtable Base. People attend for many years and it would be nice to be able to give them a way to view all of their data accrued over the years. (There are various challenges and assessments that generate data year-to-year, and it would be beneficial to give attendees a way to see all of their data over the years.)

What is the best platform to create user accounts tied to Airtable data? The users would ideally be able to sign in to a profile with a username/pw and see their data from all years of attending the conference.

I know that you can sync bases and have messed around with this, but it requires all user input to be put in exactly correct, or it will not automatically find and sync records from different bases. This results in a huge manual process of finding correct matching records and correcting typos in something like a name or a birthday (fields I use to create a unique id for each person that should be constant year to year), so that the records will match. This is untenable long-term and I know there has got to be a way to link each record to an account management platform. I’m thinking something like Zapier or similar interface would be involved, but I could be wrong and I’m totally open to suggestions.

What can I use to solve for this?

Thank you for any help and insight.

[kuovonne]

Welcome to the Airtable community!

There are two different issues here

• creating a login system for users to view their own data
• consolidating information from multiple bases

There are many 3rd party systems that can build a ‘portal’ for people to view their own data. Some common optons include MiniExtensions, Stacker, Softr, Pory, and Glide. They all work slightly differently, have slightly different features, and have different price points.

Showing data aross multiple bases is a different matter. While portal systems can show data across multiple bases, it is much easier if all the data is in a single base. However, you may run into other issues when trying to consolidate data, such as versioning information and dealing with record limits. (If a person changed addresses over the years, do you store each year’s address, or only the most recent address?)

There is no single answer or solution.