Is it possible to export a revision history? And if so, can a specific date range be specified?
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Exporting revision history
+5Best answer by Bill_French
Hi David, and welcome to the community.
Hypothetically, there is now a way to do this and more. I haven’t actually done it, but it goes something like this:
- For any table you want to track revisions on, create a condition that causes modified records to appear in a “revisions” view.
- Create a script action that is performed on any records in that view; the script action simply creates a revision log (internally as another table or externally in another system). It should contain the record ID, dates/times, with other meta data as desired.
- Create a reporting process (API or otherwise) to export the log data.
Optionally, such a process could send the entire changed record to another system, thus negating the need to export at all.
Hypothetical, non-trivial effort, possibly achievable with Zapier and Integromat, but likely to work.
+35This is not natively possible within Airtable.
If you wanted to export revision history, you would need to create your own table of records that kept track of every time a record was modified.
This could be automated with either Airtable’s automations or with Make’s advanced automations for Airtable.
If you’ve never used Make before, I’ve assembled a bunch of Make training resources in this thread. For example, here is one of the ways that you could instantly trigger a Make automation from Airtable.
I also give live demonstrations of how to use Make in many of my Airtable podcast appearances. For example, in this video, I show how to work with Airtable arrays in Make.
Hope this helps! If you’d like to hire the best Airtable consultant to help you with anything Airtable-related, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consultant — ScottWorld
Hi David, and welcome to the community.
Hypothetically, there is now a way to do this and more. I haven’t actually done it, but it goes something like this:
- For any table you want to track revisions on, create a condition that causes modified records to appear in a “revisions” view.
- Create a script action that is performed on any records in that view; the script action simply creates a revision log (internally as another table or externally in another system). It should contain the record ID, dates/times, with other meta data as desired.
- Create a reporting process (API or otherwise) to export the log data.
Optionally, such a process could send the entire changed record to another system, thus negating the need to export at all.
Hypothetical, non-trivial effort, possibly achievable with Zapier and Integromat, but likely to work.
+5I settled on creating a new (hidden) field that automatically inserts the date/time any information I want to track is changed - e.g., “Mobile Phone changed”, “Home Phone changed”, etc. So I can filter and sort that field for changes in a specific time range. Not real sexy, I know, but since I have no idea how to write scripts it seemed a reasonable approach!
+35I settled on creating a new (hidden) field that automatically inserts the date/time any information I want to track is changed - e.g., “Mobile Phone changed”, “Home Phone changed”, etc. So I can filter and sort that field for changes in a specific time range. Not real sexy, I know, but since I have no idea how to write scripts it seemed a reasonable approach!
Hi @David_Carico,
One thing to note is that if you don’t know how to write JavaScripts, Make is an excellent code-free platform for automating the types of things that @Bill.French outlined above.
Lots of people in this forum, including myself, love Make! I use it almost every day! :)
See my post above for Make training resources.
Hope this helps!
If you have a budget and you’d like to hire the best Airtable consultant to help you with this or anything else that is Airtable-related, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consultant — ScottWorld
+14Doesn’t directly answer David’s question, though maybe adjacent enough to be useful: I’ve an app that gives you revision history for changes made to your base during automation runs. More details here: https://www.lomlabs.io/airtable/scripts/change-tracker
This app is also on the extensions marketplace. It takes before-and-after snapshots of your Airtable rows, allowing you to track changes to your Airtable records over time. The caveat is that for this marketplace version, snapshots must be captured manually.
https://airtable.com/marketplace/blkiHJaiXD9HoBXhf/change-tracker
Throwing this out there in case anyone finds it useful.
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