What is the general goal of the feature?
To be able to see who edited the document, and when.
What are the most likely user stories for how and when this would be used by someone on your team?
I have several users with ability to edit submissions, and when there needs to be update in a previously saved submission, I want to know if the form is edited, and by whom and when. This way I can separate the work load accordingly. And we can check if submitted form is edited or not.
Can you sketch out graphically how you think this should look/work in practice?
Imagine adding 2 additional columns to the Data > Table section, after “submitted_by” which can be named “edited_by” holds user name data, “edit_time” (name can be changed) which holds well, time of edit.
How useful would this feature be to other users or organizations?
To check if the submission is edited or not.
To check if the user who can edit made his/her job or not.
Etc.
What can you contribute to making this feature a reality?
I can beta test? By editing a lot? sorry not much really.
This would definitely be a useful feature that we would use. We have a similar use case to the poster in this suggestion in that we sometimes need edits to a previously saved submission and just want to be able to see if an edit was made (when and by whom).
An audit trail, as suggest in the associated suggestions (Update an already-submitted record on a mobile client - #7 by nat) would be nice but just being able to the date of when last edited and by whom would be hugely useful and probably much simpler to implement!
As a workaround, you could use end (metadata) timestamp. If this datetime is after the submission_time, the case was edited on server level, in modal edit mode.
But pay attention: Local (end) and server (submission_time) datetime/timezone might be different and a bulk edit will not change the end datetime.
Another option might be to provide additional fields in the form for later edit work , e.g. EditWhen, EditBy and EditComment.
This meta/rootUid also indicates that there has been a (modal) edit. But this column is only available in table view and will probably be removed soon by the Kobo team. See New column in table view: meta / rootUuid - #3 by jnm.
Ok, thanks. I know you are saying this might be removed but just for clarification, are you saying the presence of meta/rootUuid indicates there has been a modal edit? I don’t see documentation on the format of that field either so it seems it would be hard to use that to know when something was last edited.
I will probably just add ‘end’ to my form as documented and giving me a timestamp.
sorry not much really.