Is there any way to manipulate table activity as data in other parts of your document?

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Hello there - I’m found a question here that references seeing document changes in tables; it mentions the activity log which shows all table changes. For us, all of our data lives in tables and if I could merge all of this together into a changelog that would be super helpful (i.e. take the activity log of every table, and assemble it in chronological order in one single master table).

I assume this is not possible based on the original post, but figured I would at least ask!

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Dear @Sean_Meehan,

Like versioning in Word is possible because each update is independed from each other.

I won’t say it’s not possible, but rather complex as an update in one table could also reflect in many more depended tables and when this info is updated, it can reflect again another group of tables.

I am sure that at the “back end” all this info is logged and could be traced, but obviously it will need a different skill /access level then the end user has.

How deep would we go to see the dependencies, everything is till a certain extend related

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It’s not possible, but you can design your doc in such way that all changes are logged somewhere.

Technically — there is a system table that stores row activity, but trying to read from it will alert the Coda team and they’ll get your doc disabled.

Here are your options:

  • Add automations that will watch for edits to your tables and add rows to a log table. This is the most transparent solution, but it may not log all the changes (automations run with some delay and only use the latest snapshot of data, possibly skipping some previous edits)
  • Build your doc in such way that every time a user edits something, they have to click a button (e.g. they don’t edit values in the data tables directly but use some sort of a temporary table, then a button copies values from that table into the data table). You can then program the button to also log the change into a log table.
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Thanks @Paul_Danyliuk @Jean_Pierre_Traets !! I figured this was the answer I’d get but worth asking anyways. Great tip on automations, that could solve the end use case I need a fix for.