How do I associate a file with a key on google drive? - automation

Question

I'm trying to automate a process at my company where I have to send files to my customers every month.
These files are unique and each customer must receive their own. In addition, I wanted the client to be required to answer an NPS assessment form in order to have access to his file.
Honestly, I don't understand much about programming and I'm just trying to find a solution to do this automatically.
The solution I have in mind today is to use a google forms form and after filling out the form a link would be made available to access a google drive folder (that way the customer would be obliged to answer the form to have access to his file).
In the google drive, each file would be associated with a unique access key (for example, an identification number of that customer, in which he already knows what it is).
Then these customers should insert this key in the google drive folder in order to be able to access their file. That way I would be able to: get all the answers of the evaluation in a single form, make a standard message (or tutorial) available to all customers informing them how to access their file, and give access to the files automatically because the access key would be the same every month.
Sorry for the long text but I tried to describe my problem in the best way. I am accepting any kind of help or guidance. Even where I could get help about it. This automation would be very important to me because in addition to automating a process that costs a lot of time it would give me a very powerful tool to evaluate my services. Thanks in advance to everyone who took the time to read this question.

Answer 1

The best approach in this situation is to start by using Apps Script.
Apps Script is a powerful development platform which can be used to build web apps and specifically for your situation, automate tasks. What makes it special is the fact that it is easy to use and to create applications that integrate with G Suite.
Since you mention that the files are unique for each customer, what you can do is to store these values in a key - value list. However, depending on the number of the customers, you can store these value in a spreadsheet, something similar to this:
Making the files available only after submitting the Google Form mentioned can be done by taking advantage of Apps Script's triggers.
So essentially, you can use an onFormSubmit trigger which will execute every time the above mentioned form is submitted.
Code
You can also add another column in your spreadsheet to mark if the email was sent or not; taking this into account, this is how your spreadsheet will look like:
As for the code, this is just a short snippet which does the following:
opens the spreadsheet and retrieves the values for the File ID, Customer Email and Sent columns as the following arrays ids, emails and sent respectively;
retrieves the needed form and loops through the responses and checks if the last email of the form matches any of the ones from the spreadsheet;
if the conditions check, the file permissions are edited, an email is being sent, and the corresponding row on column C is being set to TRUE;
function editPermissions() {
let form = FormApp.openById('FORM_ID');
let sheet = SpreadsheetApp.openById('SPREADSHEET_ID').getSheetByName('SHEET_NAME');
let responses = form.getResponses();
let emails = sheet.getRange('EMAILS_RANGE').getValues();
let ids = sheet.getRange('IDS_RANGE').getValues();
let sent = sheet.getRange('SENT_RANGE').getValues();
for (let i = responses.length; i > 0; i--) {
let email = responses[i].getRespondentEmail();
for (let j = 0; j < emails.length; j++) {
if (emails[j][0] == email && sent[j][0] == false) {
// edit file permissions
// send email
// mark the associated row on the Sent col with TRUE
}
}
}
}
Trigger
As for making the function above run every time there's a new form submission, you will have to create an onFormSubmit trigger which will trigger the execution of the function.
Reference
Apps Script;
Apps Script Spreadsheet Service;
Apps Script Forms Service;
Apps Script Installable Triggers.