Forum Discussion

ChrisFaye1's avatar
ChrisFaye1
Qrew Cadet
5 years ago

Add Child record when clicking save if any record fields are edits

Hi!

Looking to add a child record (in a historical table) whenever anything on the parent record is edited (and saved) as a way of reporting on historical changes over time. 
*Using log edits doesn't get us there and this can't be specific to a form rule because we would want to utilize this with grid edits as well as single record edits.

Is this something anyone has perfected?

Thank You!
Chris

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Chris
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Pipelines
Quickbase Automations
  • BlakeHarrison's avatar
    BlakeHarrison
    Qrew Captain
    5 years ago
    You'll have to setup a series of Automations or Pipelines in order to do something like this. Some users create individual Automations for each field they need to track, but you can also setup a single Automation, with multiple Create Record steps - one for each field. I tend to take the 2nd option and then have another process run that purges out any records where the Old Value and the New Value field are the same.

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    Blake Harrison
    bharrison@datablender.io
    DataBlender - Quick Base Solution Provider
    Atlanta GA
    404.800.1702 / http://datablender.io/
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    • MarkShnier__You's avatar
      MarkShnier__You
      Icon for Qrew Legend rankQrew Legend
      5 years ago
      To echo what Blake has said above, that is the way I do it as well. I choose to say the five or 10 most important field to track and have an automation which has say 6 actions For the five fields being tracked. The first five steps write out an audit trail record into a table which includes the name of the field, the old value the new value and the last modified by so we know who did the audit. Obviously it already will know the timestamp because every record and Quickbase has an automatic timestamp.  Then the last step of the automation can be to delete where the old value and the new value are the same.  

      If I plan to have an audit trail and multiple tables, then I include the table name as one of the fields being written to the audit trail.

      You should also record the record ID of the record that was being changed and then put a report link on the table being audited to show an embedded report link of the audit trail.

      Actually works very well as long as you don't have a ridiculous number of different fields to audit.  

      Fortunately, you can copy action steps in an automation so once you get the first action step working for One field it is fairly quick to copy that step to do additional fields. 


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      Mark Shnier (YQC)
      Quick Base Solution Provider
      Your Quick Base Coach
      http://QuickBaseCoach.com
      mark.shnier@gmail.com
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