Anatomy of the Changelog

Before you promote changes from a Promotable Sandbox to Production, it’s important to feel confident about the changes being made so that you can set proper expectations with your business.

The Sandbox Changelog is a feature that allows your Super Admin users to see changes that have been made in a Sandbox by any App Admin or Super Admin since the Sandbox was created. Before promoting changes to production, the changelog is an easy way to quickly verify that the last changes that were made in the sandbox are the changes you are expecting.

Accessing the Changelog

Super Admin users can find the Changelog by navigating to the Sandbox Environments page and accessing the dropdown on the individual Sandbox record:

Once the Super Admin clicks the ‘Changelog’ button they will be emailed a CSV containing all of the changes that have occurred since the Sandbox was created.

What’s included in the Changelog?

The changelog itself is a way to see at a high-level the various Adds, Modifications, and Deletes that have occurred on any of the tracked resources in your Sandbox.

The individual columns in the Changelog CSV are:

1. Rev - This is the unique ID associated with the Changelog revision. You’ll reference this number if you ever have questions or concerns about the Changelog when working with the TrackVia Support Team.

2. Resource ID - This is the unique TrackVia ID of the element that has been added/modified/deleted in the Sandbox. This is also to have a clear understanding of whether or not the name of the Form/View/Table, etc., has been changed many times in the Sandbox.

3. App Name - This is the name of the App that the affected resource is in.

4. Resource Name - This is the name of the element that was added/modified/deleted.

5. Resource Type - This indicates what the resource that was added/modified/deleted was. For a full list of all resource types that are tracked, see here.

6. Revision Type - What happened to this resource? There are three values that will appear in this column, either ADD, MOD, or DEL

7. Last User - This is the TrackVia User ID of the App Admin or Super Admin responsible for the change.

8. Revision Date - This is the date/time that the revision was made in the Sandbox. Your Changelog will show all entries in descending order from the most recent changes made in the Sandbox to the oldest.

Note: Revision Date appears in UTC. If you need to convert UTC to your timezone, you can simply Google “UTC Converter” to see the conversion.  

9. Secondary Resource Type - For some Resource Types, the Secondary Resource Type column will give you more information about what changed. For example, Tables are the core elements of any TrackVia application. When tables are added/modified or deleted, there will be a record in the changelog for each field that was touched. Additionally, this is where you'll be able to see the Table & Event Triggers associated with your App Script changes.

10. Secondary Revision Type - Similar to the “Revision Type” field, Secondary Revision Type shows you if specific fields on your table were added (ADD), modified (MOD), or deleted (DEL).

For example, in this changelog we can see that Admin Jenny has made a handful of changes in their Promotable Sandbox:

Starting from the bottom, Jenny’s actions were:

1. Adding a table called “Special Projects” with (6) fields:

a. Estimated Completion Date

b. Estimated Start Date

c. Detailed Description

d. Quick Description

e. Project Number

f. and an Auto Counter

2. When the table was created, the Default Form and Default View were also created.

3. Then Jenny created a “New Special Projects Form”

4. Created a Filter called “My Special Projects”

5. Created a View called “My Special Projects”

6. Edited the PM Dashboard

7. and finally, added an App Script called “PM Automation Script” to the “Special Projects" table.

Up Next: Promotable Sandboxes and Mobile Offline