Block row or column information or modification history

Hello Baserow team :slight_smile:

I would like to help with ideas for innovative features for Baserow. I think this software has everything I need.

But, I’m having some difficulty using baserow. Below is a list of personal problems and some possible solutions.

I tried to send this suggestion in contact area, but got no response.

Feature name

Block row or column information or modification history

Reason for this feature:

Greater security and control of data in Baserow.

Problem 1

If someone deletes a row or column from the table, how can I retrieve that deleted row or column?

Ideas for solving problem 1

  1. What if we had a cool feature where you want someone to access a specific row without being able to change another specific row or column too?
  2. What if we had a cool feature where you can have a history of changes like Google Sheets?

Solution for problem 1:

Modification history or even a lock on this row or column of the table.

Problem 2

  1. In addition to this problem, another problem is that as there is no history of changes and blocking, I end up having to export the data from the table.
  2. Every time I have to import the data I saved or I backed it up. About this, it is difficult to manage my data because in some cases it is overwritten.

Solution for problem 2:

Modification history or even a lock on this row or column of the table.

References

1 Like

Hm, have you see the trash / restore functionality? This exactly solves your first problem.
trash

For your second problem we definitely do plan to add change history! When you talk about a lock do you mean a way of password protecting a row and column so only some users can see/edit it?

2 Likes

When you talk about a lock do you mean a way of password protecting a row and column so only some users can see/edit it?

it could be a password or even a lock, something a person cannot see or edit.

reference

Cool, can confirm we have plans to add access control to Baserow so that feature will be coming :slight_smile:

1 Like

Thank you for the information and I await your brief contact if this feature is implemented.

I realized that there is only a 3 day history to retrieve the information. Gmail has a similar feature to retrieve messages, in gmail you have 7 days to retrieve the message from the trash. After that, the message is automatically deleted. So it is not possible to recover.

  • This official Baserow usage plan price comparison page doesn’t say about it, would it be interesting to add this information - If there is 3 days to recover the deleted table or row? - in the price comparison table?

Another thing, there are more modern softwares in which the user has the possibility to put the time that the table or row would be deleted. For example, in Quire io you can create a task with a start and end date. Upon completion of the task, you have an option to remove the task history for 1 week, 1 month, 1 year, 1 day etc.

Is there any intention or idea of ​​Basedow having a history of temporary modifications? In the sense of having an end date (for example 1 year or 1 month) to be removed or updated the information referring to rows and columns of any database?

Examples

image

We have a few ideas/features in the pipeline which might help with this. Webhooks are coming soon so perhaps you could initially hook and external service up to a table with webhooks and that external service would delete rows after a certain amount of time?

An another idea I have here is adding a “Trashed” column. The way this could work is you set a formula when you make a trashed column and when that formula evaluates to True for a row it will trash the row and send it to the trash bin (where it would be permanantly deleted a few days later). This could then be used with the potential future NOW() formula function and so you could create a Trashed column with a formula of (NOW() - field('Created')) > date_interval('1 month') which would auto trash rows after one month.

My worry with such a field is that it would be very easy for you to write an incorrect formula and accidentally delete all the rows, or rows you don’t want to delete. So perhaps instead it would just be better to do the following:

  1. Implement the NOW() formula function
  2. Then users could add a normal formula field with the formula (NOW() - field('Created')) > date_interval('1 month')
  3. You create a filter on the table which only shows rows where the formula is false, this would be your normal view and it would only show items which were created in the last month (or what ever time period you set)
  4. We implement a bulk delete/multi select delete option
  5. Users could then make another view of the table where the formula is true and go through and bulk delete those themselves whenever.

I think this second way would be safer and less dangerous for users as there is still a human involved when deciding to actually delete rows.

1 Like

Hello, I come here to abstain from polluting the forum with new threads when another similar thread can be completed :grinning: , so it’s a +1 to join @anon7289648 demand that baserow.io can benefit from a revision history system, in particular in a multiuser environment that we hope will come soon.

The record level revision history implemented by airtable seems a good one, but it apparently lack a way to see globally all the modifications done on a table or base, instead of going on each record to look at the modifications. So maybe baserow can imagine to do a better job than airtable ! :slight_smile:

3 Likes

@Vincent, we had a short discussion with @bram on this topic, and he told me that we plan to implement the row change history in the row edit modal chat. And we’re also going to add an audit log as an enterprise feature where an admin can see all the changes that were made in Baserow by all the users.

What do you think about this?

1 Like

Hello @olgatrykush , sorry for my late answer on this : what @bram propose is perfect for us :slight_smile:
For the audit log that can be seen by an admin as an enterprise feature, it’s very good for us at this stage, but I can imagine that in the future, it might be desirable for some users to have sufficient rights to a database to be able to see all changes to that database without necessarily having to be “global admin”

1 Like

Is there any news about modification history per row like in Airtable?
In Airtable, there’s something called “Revision History” for each record which shows in the comments sections of each row, see screenshot

2 Likes

Hello @mahmouds12! In Baserow 1.13 we plan to release an Audit log (that would be an Enterprise feature), after that we will probably start working on the Modification history :slightly_smiling_face:

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Hello @Vincent @anon7289648 and @mahmouds12. I have great news for you, the audit log feature was released in Baserow 1.14. It’s an Enterprise-level feature, and only server admins can access it. Please check all the details in this blog post: https://baserow.io/blog/1-14-release-of-baserow.