Create a Version History for Records

This article will review setting up a version history for your records in your Knack app.

This article covers the following topics:

• Overview

• Use Case

• Steps

  • Creating Your Data Tables and Enabling Users

  • Adding Fields to Your Data Tables

  • Building Out Your Pages and Views

Overview

This article aims to guide you through the process of setting up a version history for your records. By following this guide, you will gain insights into the setup of this workflow and be able to implement it in various scenarios of your own.

Use Case

If you have forms that generate and modify records, it is important to keep track of the date and time, as well as the user responsible for creating or updating the record. This is possible by enabling the record history feature, but the data will only be available from within the Builder.

This guide will provide a guide to set up a version history for records that can be viewed by your app users within the Live App. Admins can log in to manage equipment inventory, view which employees have borrowed which equipment, and view a log of all previous checkouts for an item.

Requirements

Before setting up a version history for your records and following along with the steps in this article, you will need to have users enabled in your app. You can learn more about getting started with users here: About Users

With this use case, we will also be utilizing record rules. You can learn more about record rules here: Using Record Rules

For a more general overview of everything you need to know about using the Builder, see our Builder Guide section of our learning center.

Steps

1.  Creating Your Data Tables and Enabling Users

To begin, we'll want to ensure that we have users enabled in the app. To learn how to enable users, see our article here: Activating Users

Once users are enabled, we can add two user role tables:

• "Employees": Employees will login and return/borrow items

• "Supervisors": Supervisors will login and can view each item's log history

After that, we can add a non-user role data table named "Items" and another data table named "Logs":

2.  Adding Fields to Your Data Tables

Next, we can add the appropriate fields needed for this use case in the Items and Logs tables.

To start, we will add a connection field in the Items table that connects to the Employees user role table. This connection will be a one-to-many connection type:

Then, in the Logs table, we'll also need to add two connection fields:

• "Library Item": Where each Log record can connect with one Item and each Item record can connect with many Log records

• "Employee": Where each Log record can connect with one Employee record and each Employee record can connect with many Log records

In the Items table, we'll need the following additional fields:

• Short Text field named "Item"

• Paragraph Text field named "Brief Description"

• Short Text field named "Item Number"

• Yes/No field named "Available"

 Lastly, in the Logs table, we'll need the following additional fields:

• Date/Time field named "Date"
• Multiple Choice field named "Action"
  • Options: Borrowed & Returned
• Paragraph Text field named "Comments"

Feel free to experiment with this workflow on your own and, if it aligns with your specific use case, implement it across multiple apps to establish a version history for your data! 🚀