Good way of implement a changelog for app users

Anvil Q&A
1

So, I wanted to greet returning users with an alert of all the things that changed in the app since they last logged in.

New features, bug fixes, etc. I would store the last version that the user saw and check if there were changes since then to show them.

Now, the thing is, I sometimes work on a lot of features on the same/multiple branches before merging the changes into master and I wanted to make the changelog as I do the features, but only show them once the features go to production.

Anyone here have any ideas of How to make this? Or that already implemented something similar?

Any help is appreciated.

2

I like this idea!

For your feature list, it sounds like you already have a table of features, by App version number. (You assign these numbers yourself; Anvil doesn’t do it for you.)

And each user has a tag, showing the App version number as of the last time they logged in.

In order to fill in that tag, you must also have an app-global variable listing the App version number for the currently-published version. You would update this number every time you publish a new version.

Assuming that version numbers are sortable, you can just query the “features” table for the version numbers in the desired range. (An order_by clause would also make sense.)

I’d probably display it in a RichText component. Maybe even format it as a table on-screen.

3

Yeah, my current version of the idea as almost exactly what you said: Have a global constant manually updated in the app of every new feature and create a table with version, image and text so I can query for lesser and equal. That way the app version would only update once I merge into the production branch.

I can’t seem to think any other better ideia than this.

Were I currently work we have a form of getting changelogs from a tag written in the commit version. I would love if we could query a list of the last n commit messages in the editor in the current branch. That would be perfect, since I could add a tag of the version there and don’t have to manually update a global variable.

But for now, I dont’ think there’s any better way of doing it than the one I thought and you suggested.

Thanks for your input!

1 Like