Property Calculator - Comments captured through the workflow

Hoping someone can help with a solution to capture comments as the occur through the workflow, date - user - comment

The scenario is we'd like to capture the comments as each user approves their part of the workflow, building out the following autovalue properties for each workflow state will produce the correct result providing the user enters the comment when prompted, as they change the workflow state.

The issue is, If the user adds a comment and saves, this comment is on a previous version, when a user then changes the workflow state there is no need to add further comment, the result means the comment placeholder is now blank. 

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  • This is for just assigning the object

    I can setup the below to capture whenever there is a new comment. However I'm at a loss how I'd add the users name into the expression next to the comment.

    Then after getting the name, I'd love a timestamp in the correct regional format

    Basically building out the comment toggle on the metadata card, and doing it in a multiline text. Doing this for a couple of reason, the first being a user that gains permissions at say version 7 of the object, will not see any comments prior. The second is for an internal process to send a notification as part of the workflow will all the comments.

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  • Hi!

    I had a similar requirement (see Is there any way to show comments from PREVIOUS STATES in a workflow notification? - General Topics - Forums - M-Files Community), and the solution was to create a Property Definition (text) that catches each comment ('Calculate Expresssion') and then these properties can then be included in notifications.
    I guess in your case, if you want to capture the comments from each state - you would need to create multiple properties using each workflow state as a condition. Then these properties can be summarised in the notifications.
    Maybe a screenshot from our Property Calculator module demonstrates how we did this:


  • Thanks Patrick, a very similar scenario.

    By using the condition type 'changed property value' and then adding a secondary condition of comment not being empty, I am able to write all comments into a multi text property without issue.

    I setup a property transition timestamp, and within the workflow used set the property to update the transition time. Then using property calculator I used the convert date function to changed the transition date to text. The reason for this is because if I use the Timestamp property within expression, the format is the wrong region.

    I'm confident I can get a multitext with only the comments and the time they occurred, the missing piece is getting the user name who completed the transition. 

  • Hi,

    Easiest way to pick user information is to do it during the state transition. You can save information from "Last Modified by" property:

    This should let you collect user to user lookup or to text property.

    If you have separate Employee/Person objects in vault, you can pick that object instead by using search.

    Here we pick employee / person, which "m-files user" property is same as last modified by user. I would suggest this option because it gives you more properties and options.

    Similarly, it is possible to read time stamp from "Last Modified" property, if you do not want to store it in separate "Transition timestamp" property.

    Note that I created these configurations to demonstrate options. I haven't tried them out. Please test them carefully if you end up using similar logic.