Let’s say a user is in a “Recipes” table and they’re adding ingredients via a standard lookup to an “Ingredients” table. The lookup is set to multi-select, so they can come back any time and add more ingredients. What I want to do is extract the metadata when someone adds another item in the lookup.
For example, the ingredients lookup might already have “carrots”, “onions” selected. A user comes in and selects “salt”, so now there are three items selected in the lookup. What I want to be able to find later is:
what ingredient was added (“salt”)
who added it
what time it was added
I thought I could solve it with a separate table (e.g., “Ingredients Added”) and an automation, such that a change to the “Ingredients” drop down list would trigger the creation of a new row that captured 1-3. The problem is I can’t pull the ingredient or the user. The automation creates the new row and adds the date/time using Now(), but I can’t figure out how to get it to pull the reference to the ingredient or the user who added. I thought I could get the user, but the only options to use when creating the row in the automation are the automation bot and the doc owner.
Hi Andy. I’m not in computer now, but what I’ve in mind : I would set an automation that will copy the content as TEXT from your lookup column after you add something, to a « old ingredients » column. This automation can run just after your first one.
So when someone updates the list
The column is changing but the « old ingredients » list is still the same as the data have been pasted as value
Your automation runs and see the new contents. Then you can somehow substract new and olds value to have the added ingredients.
The end of your automation will replace the « old ingredients » as new one.
4 ready to new modification
That’s a good question, when an automation run, if you want to use User() value, which user will it take into account if several users are connected in the same time ?
I also use fruit example when I’m handling nuclear code or 7-digits salary informations
Happy to have provided a little help on that interesting subject