🆕 Action to open Edit screen

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21

These are great ideas, I’m writing my ideas out to see potential challenges.

Add an action to set the user’s email to a global column. Only allow going to the edit screen when that column is empty or that column is the signed-in user.

However, if I recall right, the “on submit” action of the edit screen does not work with the “cancel” button. If you go into the edit screen and decide to cancel the edit process then that email column never gets cleared.

If the data is not too big then we can theoretically use a set column to copy all global columns to a set of columns under the “column folder” Log, then after the edit you can do a comparison.

Other way is add a new row to a new Sheet and compare data to the last line of that sheet (retrieved through last row using single column). However it will cost a lot of rows.

22

Thanks for the jumpstart @ThinhDinh

I came up with a solution for the changelog (not yet for locking the edit button, which requires a timeout with math and date columns). Feel free to copy this app.

It relies on a “temp” sheet, in which every user gets two rows, once signed up (“add rows” during sign-up is not implemented yet).
Every sheet, for which changes should be tracked, needs to have two looked-up arrays and two many-to-one relations to these two above mentioned “user-specific” rows in “temp”.

Every “open edit screen” action sets the first “user-specific” row in “temp”. Every “on submit” action sets the second “user-specific” row. The comparison between those two rows is made through single value, ITE and template columns in the “temp” sheet. “Set column actions” work through the above mentioned relations.

You can monitor as many columns as you like (I implemented 4: A, B, C, D). Best is to have different columns per data type (not implemented yet).
This solution with 2 user-specific rows in temp is not sensitive to cancelled edit screens, since the first row will always be overwritten once an edit screen is opened.

Let me know what you think. Improvements/feedback are welcome!

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23

That’s a good start!

I tried a bit with replacing the Cancel text with my own text but haven’t succeeded :frowning: Can’t put a customized div in front of the top bar without breaking something else.

24

Hi @Gregory ,
Great job with this app. I tried to play with it and it did “catch” the fact that I changed something, but I couldn’t see the change itself, or a before/after comparison. In any case, it seems that this solution is rather cumbersome. Has anyone thought of another approach to logging all changes?

well, not sure. I tried to edit some forms and when you press “back” the changes are already implemented in the data. Not sure if this is a planned behavior or if I have something misconfigured.

Thanks

25

One approach I can think of is using a form instead of an edit screen. However, it’s still cumbersome.

Let’s say your data has only one column and you “submit” a new value for it through the form. The form writes a row to the new Sheet with that column’s “current” value and “new” value. Then the “on submit” action would do a set column back to the original row to save the change.

26

Hi @Test_Test

coincidentially, I progressed the last few days on this feature and made a new version for you:

The old version of the app is broke, since I worked on it to improve it (and made no copy for that). I’ll delete it.