I’ve got a table that includes a column of “Team Members” on a project. I want to open this column up to editing by the managers of teams, but want to track the changes.
I want to be able to see the “diff” of the changes, and am having trouble thinking through the most user friendly way to do this. I wanted to use Automation, but I’m not sure there’s a “Historical” option. One thing I was considering was:
Create column that is called “Historical record of people”
Create automation that runs when “Team Members” column is changed
When automation runs, it captures what the new “Team Members” is, writes that to a new table, along with the historical record column, then it updates the historical record column to match the new team members, effectively giving me a “diff”
Is there a better way to do this? To capture diffs throughout any column without needing a log column?
Let’s say there are two columns. I want to see the column before and the column after the change. My automation above does work, but it feels hacky. I’m basically wondering/wanting to know if there’s a Step 1 Result.Previous Value, or Step 1 Result.Changed Values, that can give me the “diff”
A previous topic I realized I started on this said you can look up previous values in the UI, but I’m not sure if they are programmatically query-able
For what it’s worth, this is basically what I do. It doesn’t seem possible to access the before state of the row that triggers an automation (unfortunately!) nor can you access the UI’s activity history via formula.
So I cache previous values in a previous value column.
And then in cases where I need more history, yes, I write to a log table whose columns are Row (lookup), Date (date/time), before value, after value.
You can cache the values in another column as @Nick_HE suggested. You can also create a ‘mini table’ in the the column by creating an array/list of prior cache values using something like: