User invite validation

[Vinnie Marchisio]

Greetings, folks.!

I once again turn to this community in search of a sollution to my problem.

We have a large group of students we want to invite to take a series of surveys. However, we do not want to use a public link to distribute the surveys. 

Instead, we would like to have a publicly available form, where the student would fill two inputs with their email and student id. Here's the catch, we would like for the input to interact with a database, where we already have all of the students' emails and ids, to match it to an item in the database and return to the student their individual link.

Has anyone tried anything like this? Is it even possible withion REDCap?

Thanks in advance, and eager to read whatever contributions you guys can bring...

[Florence Breslin]

If it is possible, it would be huge. This reply is mostly to make sure that if someone has an answer, that I see it. But I have not been able to identify a way to do that.

[Brad Trumpower]

My solution isn't exactly like you're trying to do, but close. In the survey distribution tools > participant list, you can upload the email address and participant identifier of your choosing for all of the group of students you're trying to survey. You would have to check with your local admins what the limit is on how many total can be in the list and how many at one time can be invited. To get exactly what you're looking for I'm thinking it would be doable with the API. If you're sending that invite where they put their email and student ID in to everyone, you might as well skip that step and just invite your whole group. If you're putting a flyer out or just sending it to a student listserv/newsletter, you'll need the API.  If you're going that route, your issue is mainly a programming one with very little happening on the REDCap side. My best guess how it would work is:

1) student fills out form

2) API is pinged every X minutes to check for new records. [you could do this manually, but that may affect engagement if they have to wait too long to receive the link].

3) Run a program that compares the two identifiers to your database to look for a match.

4) After comparing to your database, trigger the API to fill a REDCap variable Yes/No if it matches.

5) Set up a REDCap trigger that sends the survey if the match variable = Yes. 

6) Optional, send a notification if there is not a match either to the student or to you to double check it.

Jump into the API sandbox and start trying things out. There's lots of good starter code out there to get going.