How to Track Changes to Gravity Forms Entries

How to Track Changes Made to Gravity Forms Entries

Written by Casey Burridge

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Do you know track changes for Microsoft Word and Google Docs? It’s that important feature that allows you to see who made changes to a document and when.

Well, wouldn’t it be nice to have the same thing for Gravity Forms entries? Do you see where I’m going with this? 😁

In today’s post, we’re going to dive into the Entry Revisions add-on to see how it can be used to show a full history of changes made to an entry and restore prior versions with the click of a button. 

Why Track Changes in Gravity Forms

There are several reasons to track changes made to your Gravity Forms entries. Here are some of the ones we see most often:

Track Order Status

If you’re using Gravity Forms as an eCommerce solution, you can use Entry Revisions to track the status of product orders. For example, when an order is first made, it may start off as “Processing” until a team member confirms the payment and changes it to “Confirmed”. 

After the order has been fulfilled, it will need to be changed to “Shipped”. Having the ability to track entry updates allows you to easily correct errors when they arise.

See Changes to User Details Over Time

If you’re using Gravity Forms and GravityView as a CRM solution or a customer database, you’ll often find yourself updating entry information. It can be helpful to see what was changed and when. And if you need to restore a field value from a prior version, you can do that too!

Track Edits Made By Your Members on Membership Sites

With GravityView, you can allow users to edit their Gravity Forms entries from the front end of your website. For large websites with a lot of users, it’s important to keep a record of all changes so that you don’t accidentally lose important data.

Tracking changes made to Gravity Forms entries using GravityRevisions

Gravity Forms Entry Revisions is part of our essential suite of Gravity Forms add-ons. Entry Revisions comes as part of our GravityView All Access license.

Installing the Plugin

If you already have a GravityView All Access license, you can install Entry Revisions from inside your WordPress backend.

First, hover over Views in the left-hand menu and click on Manage Add-Ons. Next, scroll down to Gravity Forms Entry Revisions and click Install. After installation is complete, activate the plugin to start tracking changes to your form entries!

The GravityView "Manage Add-Ons" screen in WordPress

Track Changes

To see all changes made to an entry in Gravity Forms, first, hover over Forms in your WordPress admin menu and click on Forms. Then hover over your form and click on Entries.

The "Entries" link underneath a Gravity Form

Next, hover over an entry and click View. Scroll down to the bottom of the page and you’ll see a new Entry Revisions meta box, displaying a list of revisions made to that entry. Each revision in the list displays the username of the person who made the change as well as the date and time the change was made.

The Entry Revisions meta box showing a list of revisions made to an entry in Gravity Forms

To view details about the revisions, such as the fields and values that were altered, simply click on the link.

Restore Prior Versions of an Entry

Gravity Forms Entry Revisions makes it easy to see what values were changed and restore them if necessary. Simply click on the link to bring up the full details of the change. You’ll see two versions of the entry side-by-side; the Revision Value and the Current Value.

To restore an older value, click on it to check the box and then press “Restore this Value”. You can do this for multiple values or single values.

Demonstrating the "Restore Values" functionality for Entry Revisions

If you want to restore the entire entry, you can quickly select all fields by checking the box at the top or bottom of the entry.

Configure Email Notifications for Entry Updates

Entry Revisions also gives you the option to receive an email notification every time a user updates an entry. This is helpful if your site has several administrators that regularly edit entries. It’s also helpful if you’re using GravityView to allow users to edit their Gravity Forms entries post-submit.

Navigate to your form settings and click on the Notifications tab on the left. Then, click Add New to create a new notification and under Event select the option that says “Entry is updated, revision is saved”.

The Gravity Forms Notifications screen

Next, fill out the rest of the information for the notification. To include a side-by-side comparison of the field changes, you can use the {entry_revision_diff} merge tag.

A Gravity Forms notification message that includes the "entry ID" merge tag and the "entry revision diff" merge tag

That’s it! Now you’ll receive an email notification every time a user updates an entry, with a beautiful list of changes. If you’re wondering how to display these changes on the front end using GravityView, read How to Display Entry Revisions on the Front End.

Gravity Forms Track Changes: Final Thoughts

Track changes is a powerful feature of Microsoft Word and Google Docs that allows users to view who made changes to a document and when. 

The Entry Revisions plugin by GravityView adds this same functionality to Gravity Forms, giving you the ability to view the history of an entry and restore prior versions with the click of a button. You can also set up email notifications to send every time an entry is changed.

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