Connecting a referenced CMS collection to more data?

Design help CMS
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Hi everyone,

I stumbled upon a conceptual roadblock and before I start building the website I would like to know if it’s possible with the Webflow CMS.

Let’s assume that teachers and students can log on a website - the teachers see the tests and the students that took part in them. Next to the students’ names the teachers could see their score in % points (see jpg below). The test answers and the scores would be stored in Google Sheets, therefore an Integromat integration would be essential.

In terms of the CMS, I would have following collections:

  • Users - for storing both students and teachers
  • Tests - for storing the test info + multi-reference field for the students that took the test

But here comes the question - how to assign the score to the user (student) who is already a reference to another collection? How would you go about that idea?

I’d be super grateful for suggestions :slight_smile:

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Hey @Mav7, Webflow is not an application development platform, it’s a website design platform. That’s quite different. Webflow’s CMS is great for basic content, but it is not a robust relational database. You’ll run into a lot of frustration is you try to use it as one.

There are also other fundamental things missing you’ll also have to sort out like user logins, and data security which are not fundamentally part of Webflow. Make sure you expect those limits, and proof your implementation requirements before you go too deep into the design work.

I also want to note that it’s difficult to visualize the complete data model you’re imagining. I happen to design education systems, and normally, an education system needs a bit more depth in order to function. Districts, Schools, Teachers, Students. Teams, Classes, Courses, Tests, and Grades are all part of that.

Hope you don’t mind, I thought that was some important background context to set, before I answer your question.

If we set all that aside, and assume you’ve got a good authentication approach, your grades problem is pretty straightforward.

You’d simply need a Grades collection that contains;

  • Test ( link to Test record )
  • Student ( link to Student record )
  • Date
  • Score %
  • Class ( optional link to Class record )

This is the Collection you’d be populating from Make ( Integromat ) or Zapier- which is also not trivial, since you’d want to sync and lookup the Students / Classes etc. along with the Grades.

Once you have data in that table, it’s pretty easy to create nice looking views- a list of recent grades for a Student, or all Students in a Class, or everyone who took a Test, and so on.

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