Make a Sheets Record History downloadable or queryable

The fact that Ragic keeps a history of changes made to each record is great! And I also love the ability to view and download changes to sheets via the adminstrator’s Data Management tool, Recent Changes.

However, as far as I know, none of those options give the user the ability to download the history of ALL records in a given sheet / data table.

Feature Request

Please give administrators the ability to download history data for all records in a sheet as a single CSV.

Additional Considerations: It would be nice if that download included the history of deleted records (if possible)

Including history on deleted records may present technical challenges, so if full record history on deleted records is not possible, then please at least have information such as the record name, date deleted, and user who deleted it.

The goal of being able to download the history data is to be able to run reports such as:

  • All records touched/deleted/created by a particular user in the past week
  • All records that have been edited at a particular Date/Time.
  • All records that have been renamed to a name containing {Input Naming Mistake}
    (regEx expressions useful here)

Use Cases

As can be guessed from the above example reports, the biggest use cases for me arise when I am scanning through records and notice an error/discrepancy that has signs that it could be an error that was done more than once by a particular user during his entries on a particular day.

  • For such a scenario, a report showing all records changed on date X at time Y by a particular user would be useful.

Also, sometimes business gets heavy and time constraints require many urgent ad-hoc changes to records in the database. After things slow down, admin staff should have a change to go back and clean up each haphazardly edited entry. However, unless they write down all records that need to be proofed (an easy thing to forget to do), one record will inevitably be forgotten about, and time will eventually mature the error into an unpleasant surprise.

  • Again, for the above reason, it would be amazing to be able to generate a list of all records modified by a particular User on a certain Date.
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We do have a feature related to this coming up soon. I will keep everyone posted on this thread.

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Awesome, and thanks for the reply!

We have just added the feature for downloading the record history for a single record. Feel free to try it out!

Support for database-wide history download is coming up on future releases.

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Thanks, I love this feature! It is great when trying to see who did what in a searchable manner.
Thanks again for adding this, and can’t wait for the ability to download history on the whole table.

This is great so thanks a ton.
The download does not provide the same level of information as the display in the record Web UI. When you view changes in the UI, you see the field value changes which took place, yet the csv download only says who changed the record. For company auditing purposes it would need to be able to report on who changed what.

With the database wide history download may I make some suggestions.

  • Expose the data through and API for reporting and integrations. This would be useful to report on trends of how records flow by Status for example and the business can pick up process bottle necks.
  • Include record deletions in this for auditing reasons.

Hi Stephen,

Thank you for your suggestion. We will certainly consider adding an API for retrieving record history.

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Ditto that!

How can i add the last revised date for each field into the form and also in reports? I would like it actually displayed instead of having to click on the i. I also want to add the last revised date onto a pivot report.

Hi,

For recording the last modified date and time of a specific field, you may refer to this article.

As for reports, our reports will only retrieve the latest data. Hence, the reports do not support this feature.

Hi is this feature available now? If so where could I access this? Thanks!

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I’d also like to be able to access this information (database-wide history). Thank you!

Hi Jeff. Was this feature ever implemented to download the DB-wide history?