Archiving Design Pattern in Smartsheet

Kurt Maurer

Hello,

We currently have a very large Smartsheet we use to collaborate with external business partners. I have created workflows to add rows each week, and our cross-functional teams complete tasks related to each of these rows over a period of weeks.

We are struggling to find the best way to declutter this sheet once all tasks are completed for a given row. Originally, I had a workflow that would move rows to an "archive" sheet 6 months after the task was supposed to be completed. We then changed to checking for certain conditions to determine if a row should be moved, but ultimately we were moving rows to the archive sheet too early. I am leveraging the Smartsheet API in Python, and the issue with any "move" operation in Smartsheet is that we lose information in any cell that contains a formula. You can see the problem with this; if a row was moved too early, we cannot move it back without the risk of information loss.

Our next line of thinking is to manually archive stores, meaning that a user will check a box in a certain column, and the next time the workflow runs, it will check if that column is checked. If it is, then it will move the row to the archive. This would minimize any movement required from the archive back to the main sheet. But we would still have the same problem of information loss when moving rows to another sheet.

Is there a better design pattern for what we're doing here? Our end goal is to remove completed rows in the main sheet without losing information.

Thank you!

Bassam Khalil

Hi @Kurt Maurer,

Hope you are fine, when you move any row from one sheet to other it will move the value of the cell in the time of trigger but it will not move any formula the following article will help you to understand the move rows.

but for your case, you can add some helper column to define when exactly the all the tasks related to each row is completed, then you can design your workflow to move the rows to your archive using those helper columns.

if you like you can share some screenshots ( remove any sensitive data ) and i will try to help you and design it for you.

Andrée Starå

Hi @Kurt Maurer

To add to Bassam's excellent answer/advice.

Are you using Parent/children. Would it work to move a section of parent/children over to the other sheet when all children are complete?

I hope that helps!

Be safe and have a fantastic weekend!

Best,

Andrée Starå | Workflow Consultant / CEO @ WORK BOLD

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