You can carry over some values from previous form submissions using the miniExtensions form. This allows you to have your users submit many forms in a row, where some values would be identical for many subsequent submissions (e.g. linking many records to the same event or scanning many barcodes for items belonging to different departments).
The prefill functionality, as well as our redirect features will be the keys to unlocking this use case. The general idea would be as follows:
Your miniExtensions form contains the necessary fields for your items. You fill out the first record as needed, including the field(s) that you need to be identical for many records in a row.
In your Airtable table you add a formula field that generates a URL with a prefill based on the value(s) you want to apply to all records. This formula could look something like this:
'https://web.miniextensions.com/yourFormID?prefill_yourCommonFieldName=' & {yourCommonFieldName}
(Note: this example only carries over one field, but you can expand the formula to prefill multiple fields, as explained in this article.)You now set your form up to redirect to that formula field after submission. This way, once a record is submitted, your users would be redirected to a blank version of the same form, but with the common value(s) already filled out. Your users could then still edit that value/those values, if needed, when advancing to the next batch of items, or leave it as-is for as many records in a row as you like. As long as you don't change the value(s) on the form, the next record will be created with the same value(s).
If you use case involves scanning barcodes, then consider setting up your form to open the camera automatically as soon as the form is loaded, which can really speed up the workflow.
You can use the same approach for editing existing records as well. The only difference would be that the form URL in the formula field used for the redirect would contain the record ID as well, something like this: 'https://web.miniextensions.com/yourFormID/' & RECORD_ID() & '?prefill_yourCommonFieldName=' & {yourCommonFieldName}
Please note that field names are case-sensitive. Also, if your field names or values contain any special characters (including spaces), they need to be wrapped in a ENCODE_URL_COMPONENT() function within the formula. Otherwise the prefill will not work.