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Automated creation of rows in tables based on linked tables

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Brendyn_Montgom
5 - Automation Enthusiast
5 - Automation Enthusiast

We are working on a complex student reporting table for an education organisation and we’ve come across this use case:

We have a students table, a programmes table, an attendance table and a results table. We’d like to be able to create a new student, select the programme they are enrolled in and have Airtable automatically create an empty “results row” in the results table and an “attendence row” in the attendance table. Both should have the student name and the programme linked in the relevant link field.

This would save a lot of manual work for the organisation

2 Comments
Elias_Gomez_Sai
13 - Mars
13 - Mars

I think you could do it with Zapier: https://support.airtable.com/hc/en-us/articles/206785897-Using-Zapier-to-integrate-Airtable-with-oth...

Anyway, why you don’t create the Attendance and Records records when they exists? :thinking:

Brendyn_Montgom
5 - Automation Enthusiast
5 - Automation Enthusiast

Yes probably I could do it with Zapier but you have to be careful as it only does it once and you have to wait until you’re sure that a programme has been added to the student record and the other information is correct.

As a feature request it would be a lot nicer if zapier supported some autofill/automation capabilities to help make some use cases like this easier - sending it out to a third party service and back isn’t ideal.

Re creating the records Manually:
The student record needs to be directly linked to the programme for various reasons and then each student/programme combination needs an attendance record and a programme record. Generally the organisation creates the student first in the student table. Yes they could create an attendance record there that would be automatically linked to the student table but they would still have to select the programme manually. Also the names of the records are long and complicated (easy to read if you know the programme abbreviations but hard to manage in a link field like the one in the student table (where the student may or may not already have other attendance records from previous programmes - it’s much easier to create the records in the results and attendance tables manually but then you’ve got the problem of having to say add twenty students to a programme in the students table and then have to create 20 records in the results table and 20 records in the attendance table - it’s a lot of manual entry of data. :slightly_smiling_face: