How to find field which was changed on a changed record?

[Gary_Zimmer]

I see I can input the record ID of the modified record and any specific field of that record into my script, but what if I don’t know which field will be changed and I want to get that record’s field’s value?

My early testing found script automation to be kinda slow, so I want to try and be as optimized as I can be from the start.

My goal is to monitor >200 fields of a particular record type, then if any are changed, add those records together, create a running total per time period with that summed array, then update a separate record for running totals with that array. I found that addition and subtraction for this many fields at once took almost 30 seconds to update, so I want to only update the fields necessary.

EDIT: Updated to give more details about my intentions

[kuovonne · Accepted solution]

Welcome to the Airtable community!

Scripting only has access to the current values of the fields.
If you want to know which field was changed most recently, you could create “Last modified time” fields for each of the potential fields and then have your code compare times.

[Gary_Zimmer]

kuovonne:

If you want to know which field was changed most recently, you could create “Last modified time” fields for each of the potential fields and then have your code compare times

Thanks @kuovonne, but unfortunately, my potential number of fields that I want to monitor for changes is >200. Creating a ‘last modified time’ field for each monitored field sounds way inefficient.

EDIT: After some research and thinking, I realized I can do LastModifiedTime fields per grouping of selected fields, so I can narrow down which fields were modified that way.

[Derek_Keith]

I would love to see this feature figured out by Airtable. My dept is trying to switch from using Google Sheets to airtable because of it's interfaces and automations. However the team repeatedly brings up how Google Sheets is better even if it isn't as nice to work with. This exact feature is another reason why my team would prefer to stay in Google over Airtable.