Fields applicable to all types

Ideas & Features
5

OK, well one of my needs relates to monitoring/controlling the review/approval workflow, and actually, a lot of my feature requests relate to various ways that I could envisage solving it

Going back to basics, I ideally need the following:

  • a complete historical record of an entity and all its changes (including by whom)
  • the ability to define ‘snapshots’ corresponding to an entity being approved (including by whom)
  • warning (or preventing) that an entity has been (or is about to be) changed since the most recent snapshot

I have thought about various ways of getting close to this ideal without needing too many more features, and have contemplated the following workaround:

Submit and Approval buttons [edited]
When the ‘Submit’ button is approved, the current user is recorded in an ‘Author’ field and the current date/time is recorded in a ‘Submit date’ field.
When the ‘Approval’ button is pressed, check that modification date < ‘Submit date’. If so…

  • the current user is recorded in an ‘Approver’ field
  • the current date/time entered into an ‘Approval date’ field
  • the whole entity, with all fields included is exported (probably to some non-fibery cloud file storage or whatever)
  • the ‘Author’ field is then cleared

In addition, a formula field called ‘Stage’ can be used to provide visibility on progress:
If the last modification date is < the ‘Approval date’, the item is at the approved stage.
If not, then…if the 'Author field is not empty, then the item is at the submitted stage, otherwise, the item is at the draft stage.

I believe that if I experiment with the action button scripting that I can achieve the above (although I think the export part may be a bit challenging!)
However, in order for it to be as easy as possible, it would be really nice if these extra buttons/formulas could be defined once for all entities. Otherwise there’s a bit of an overhead every time I create a new type.

Of course, as the saying goes, there’s many ways to skin a cat, and I could imagine perhaps solving this in other ways.

For example, when complete entity change history become available :stuck_out_tongue: then only the snapshotting/export + warning function becomes necessary.

Or if the existing workflow extension gets some automation functionality, and dynamic https://community.fibery.io/t/entity-level-permissions/117/9 and https://community.fibery.io/t/locking-entities/911 are implemented, then I could imagine figuring something out.

Hope this is food for thought :slight_smile:

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