Is it possible to have a temporarily blank key? Or a placeholder key?

jthurston
Participant V

Hello,

I would like to use our students’ school Gmail as the key in a Students table. By using this email as the key, we can send students Google Forms that automatically grab that email, and use it to link the Form data to the student’s record, which is great!

The problem is that when a student first expresses interest in our classes, they don’t have a school email. Ideally, I would want students to fill out a brief Form that asks for basic personal information, and creates a record with a blank key that I, or another user, can enter later.

Is there a way to do this? Or some work around that might let us accomplish the same thing?

So far, the best idea I have is to have the interest Form populate a Google Sheet, and then manually type the school Gmail into the Key column in the Google Sheet. In my prototype app, this seems to work. When I type in the Gmail/Key, the student then appears in Appsheet. However, I worry if this might have unintended consequences down the line. Also, in a perfect world, I want other users to be able to add the Gmail to a student’s record without having the ability to mess with the Sheet.

Thank you!

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Steve
Participant V

What I’d imagine you’d need is two separate tables with independent keys. The first table would be used to gather info before the student has a school email, the second for use with the school email. Then just find a way to tie the two together.

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Steve
Participant V

It is not possible to have a blank key, or to change the key after the row is saved the first time.

Steve
Participant V

What I’d imagine you’d need is two separate tables with independent keys. The first table would be used to gather info before the student has a school email, the second for use with the school email. Then just find a way to tie the two together.

Thank you!

That makes sense, and I think this will solve our problem!

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