How to prevent duplicate form submissions

Andrew Ryback

Hi everyone,

I maintain a database of independent contractors in the broadcast production industry. Contractors are either manually entered into the DB, or they are submitted through a simple Smartsheet form.

Is there a way to prevent duplicate entries from being added to the DB?

For example: if someone is already in the database, rather than being allowed to complete the form (and creating a duplicate entry), can Smartsheet flag this as a duplicate and prompt them to update their existing entry instead? I imagine I'd have to use some sort of common field - like cell phone or email address - for this to even work.

I'm not sure if this is possible, but wanted to ask.

Thanks!

Adam Murphy

Hi Andrew, the forms cannot "lookup" existing data dynamically, unfortunately. Depending on your setup and workflow I would suggest adding a helper column to detect and flag duplicate entries (based on whatever criteria you consider to make a row unique) and from there you can either accept the new entry as "updated" and delete (move to another sheet to be deleted manually or via api) the older entry that already existed, or trigger a workflow to send update request to existing record and one to move the new record to another sheet. You can't prevent the duplicate submission, but you can identify and respond to it. Hope this helps!