Row Modification History

1

Anyone know how to get a list of the previous actions taken on a row? It’s stored somewhere, I know, because you can see the full history when expanding the row (along with the comments).

I’m looking to put some metrics/change-tracking in my doc (specifically several counts over time) and it would be cool to be able to see this list and play with it.

2

Great question @chris_homburger - the short answer is while the history exists as you’ve observed in Row Detail, it’s not currently accessible via the formula language. We actually recently explored exposing this with a set of of formulas like historicalvalues() and asof() which let you pull point-in-time information on a specific object (like rows in a Table). Curious what type of report you’d like to build with this info - is it number of updates to a specific record, or something else?

One other solution is similar to what you’ve implemented already in your doc - which is tracking Clients and Actions in separate tables, with the Actions table incrementing with every action taken by your team. Using that Table, you could build out some metrics / visuals showing progress over time. Would that help here, or are you looking for something more granular?

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It would be a way of doing it, but we’ve been using the table without this and already have one parent/child table relationship in the document. Doing that would be a little wraparound and add more overhead to the document, which we’re looking to avoid.

Specifically, we have three health ratings, and would like to be able to see both the count/% of each over time (as a line chart) and the adjustments that were made each week (how many moved up and how many moved down). Some combination of historicalvalues() and asof() would be great—especially if asof() could be bucketed into time.

So it’s two measurements:

  • How many fields were altered in a date range, and in what “direction” (e.g. between 1/1 and 1/31, 10 improved and 5 degraded). That second step is the kicker, I know, but we’d just need a way to map a numerical key to the colors (e.g. green=3, yellow=2, red=1) and do sum(newState - oldState) to get a meaningful metric.
  • How many fields were in state A/B/C at a specific datetime (this would be Table.filter(health=green).asof(Date).count(), or similar)

The report built out of this would give us a sense of how our projects are tracking historically throughout a period of time to see if process changes we make have an impact on their health.

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4

AsOf would allow us to update multiple tables with many-to-many relationships more easily as described in this post.

I’d be able to write an automation that would figure out what changed in a cell, then take the appropriate actions.

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5

Dear @Christian_Rodriguez,

This post below might come handy to track the modification history:

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Related question: how long does Coda keep our row activity?

For my purposes, just having the row activity available for the user to check is good enough. Ideally several years of history. I’m on the “Team” subscription, which has unlimited version history
image

but the row activity only seems to go back a few months. I can’t seem to find the answer to this in any of the documentation either.

(If I can’t easily reference more than a year of row activity, I will make something like this: Capture `History` of changes / Create Log of changes to important value of record)

7

Dear @Ryan_Martens,

I can’t really speak in name of Coda, but to my opinion the “unlimited version history” is more made to roll back to a previous version of a doc. According my logic, it has no meaning to roll back more then several months.

Looks in my opinion the better way to safe your history records and from a perspective of doc size, you might also consider to export this data.

Personally I am very happy moving reference docs that are not active to be clean up.