Choose history of current object in a lookup property

May I ask some background for why do you need this? What purpose would that property be used for?

Hi Joonas,

we have a process set that is basically this:
- A Word document object that is versioned (gets revised every year or so), and with each revision it has "tracking changes" enabled so that the approvers know what changed
- A PDF object that gets generated from this object for certain group of people in our company to read. The PDF serves to teach people stuff.
- An assignment generated from the PDF to the people that are supposed to be taught.

So this process is to teach people information through M-Files. The document is not generated with all tracked changes though, and we would like to have both a version WITH the tracked changes, and one WITHOUT the tracked changes. Now we only have the one WITHOUT them.

Our idea was to have a lookup property where the word document revisor would pick a version from history that would be the last before the tracked changes were accepted. This lookup would be then added to the PDF object and it's assignment for people to see both version WITH and WITHOUT the tracked changes.

Hopefully this is understandable for you.

Hi Joonas,

we have a process set that is basically this:
- A Word document object that is versioned (gets revised every year or so), and with each revision it has "tracking changes" enabled so that the approvers know what changed
- A PDF object that gets generated from this object for certain group of people in our company to read. The PDF serves to teach people stuff.
- An assignment generated from the PDF to the people that are supposed to be taught.

So this process is to teach people information through M-Files. The document is not generated with all tracked changes though, and we would like to have both a version WITH the tracked changes, and one WITHOUT the tracked changes. Now we only have the one WITHOUT them.

Our idea was to have a lookup property where the word document revisor would pick a version from history that would be the last before the tracked changes were accepted. This lookup would be then added to the PDF object and it's assignment for people to see both version WITH and WITHOUT the tracked changes.

Hopefully this is understandable for you.

Thanks for the explanation. This sounds a lot like what our Version Control Lite add-on module is doing: you have an editable working copy that is typically restricted to only the document authors, reviewers and approvers and a separate published version that is typically a PDF and available for a larger audience.

With this approach the authors can modify the working copy without affecting the PDF version until the changes are approved and a new published version produced.

If you need to also automate the training requirements (who needs to read what) we have a separate Training add-on module for that. This module can create the assignments for the correct user groups when new document versions are published.

If you are interested to hear more about these add-ons and see if they fit your requirements, I recommend that you contact your M-Files reseller.

Thanks for your answer Joonas. That all sounds really nice, but we already have all this implemented. It would have been really useful to know this few years ago though :D

What we need right now though is to just have one more class that also has tracked changes displayed inside of the Word document (PDF document). For this specific thing our idea was to have that lookup for a version history in the Word object. Does Version Control Lite enable this? I would rather not remake a whole process that has already been implemented. :/

I'm not sure I fully understand what you are after, sorry. I think it would be best to raise this with your reseller so that you can show the current implementation and discuss the available options.

What I meant was "tracked changes" inside word. We need one document with those tracked changes displayed inside and one document without these tracked changes displayed. With our current implementation, we only have the solution WITHOUT the tracked changes. What we need is also WITH tracked changes inside the document. Both. For me to generate that document with the changes AND without, we have to choose a version in history that still has the tracked changes displayed, because the last version of the document at the time of PDF generation doesn't have the tracked changes displayed.

That last explanation was just for clearance. My explanation skills aren't the best in english and the M-Files process is not very simple so it just multiplies the un-understandability of my posts.

I'm gonna ask our reseller then. Thanks for your help anyway.

Edit: You understand our process correctly, but I just need to add a class with tracked changes in MS Word.