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Creating an interface that allows team members to review a list of events and make comments?

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  • gees
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Hi there!  I'm hoping someone can guide me to a tutorial or has some great design ideas:  I have a base that calendarizes a huge list of events across multiple departments.  I have an interface page set-up with a record picker that displays relevant events.  I would love for each department to be able to review the list periodically and either suggest edits to existing records, or request new ones be added.

My reason for not having them directly edit the records is because I want to (a) be sure that I know about changes, (b) can resolve conflicts if different team members varied info (that happens!) and (c) am concerned about data integrity when many of our users aren't regular airtable users! 

Is the best solution here to just allow users to make edits directly & just create some level of automation/notification when edits are made?  

Or; I had thought to just request users to make edit suggestions by adding a comment to the record, and I'll get a notification to review & can make changes if needed.  

Any ideas?

 

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TheTimeSavingCo
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Yeah the commenting idea would be the easiest and fastest way to deal with it, but there's no easy way to review comment history so it might get tedious dealing with that if there are a lot of comments

If that's an issue, you could potentially give people a form that they can submit which will be prefilled to link to the Event in question, that way each comment is its own record and you can review it that way? 

The final (arguably overengineered) option is to create a form that has all of the same fields as the Event record and provide a prefilled link to that form for your users.  The user would then submit the form with whatever changes they want and you'd review that before creating a system to move the data over to the main table (probably an automation that copies the new values over or something).  This option's nice because you have an easily searchable change history for the events, but is way more work to set up than just using the second option

Adam, Consultant @ The Time Saving Co
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  • November 11, 2024
TheTimeSavingCo wrote:

Yeah the commenting idea would be the easiest and fastest way to deal with it, but there's no easy way to review comment history so it might get tedious dealing with that if there are a lot of comments

If that's an issue, you could potentially give people a form that they can submit which will be prefilled to link to the Event in question, that way each comment is its own record and you can review it that way? 

The final (arguably overengineered) option is to create a form that has all of the same fields as the Event record and provide a prefilled link to that form for your users.  The user would then submit the form with whatever changes they want and you'd review that before creating a system to move the data over to the main table (probably an automation that copies the new values over or something).  This option's nice because you have an easily searchable change history for the events, but is way more work to set up than just using the second option


Thanks for that and taking the time to write such a great response!  I like the idea of the second option - but am I allowed to somehow put a form element on the same page as a record picker/list display? I think I’m struggling with how to make it easy for the user - when they see a line item they want to change, they can just easily submit a form within that view? Or is it a button that opens a form in a new window.

or - is this crazy, could I add a column for text that would just be to collect comments for that cycle of notes, that they could edit, but not any other fields?  

TheTimeSavingCo
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gees wrote:

Thanks for that and taking the time to write such a great response!  I like the idea of the second option - but am I allowed to somehow put a form element on the same page as a record picker/list display? I think I’m struggling with how to make it easy for the user - when they see a line item they want to change, they can just easily submit a form within that view? Or is it a button that opens a form in a new window.

or - is this crazy, could I add a column for text that would just be to collect comments for that cycle of notes, that they could edit, but not any other fields?  


Ah I was thinking they'd click a button and it'd open a new window I'm afraid.  If they have Edit access, you can try giving them a linked field to another table?  And so their workflow would be: Click "Add record", the "+" and then fill out the form:


  


Hmm, yeah your idea is possible.  You'd have the same problem of it being difficult to review it though.  Also, if your plan doesn't have unlimited revision history, you'd eventually lose track of who wrote what, does that make sense?

 
Adam, Consultant @ The Time Saving Co

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