notification on row deletions

ricki · 05/23/22

I have a workflow setup to notify me when a row is deleted. All this does is send me an email that Username has deleted a row. How can I have this notification tell me what was deleted. I tried to define the following email text but all variables in the email are blank. How can we make the row deletion notifications actually contain details?

Alert: Deletion of row {{Row ID}} by {{Created By}}

Name: {{Task Name}}

Paul Newcome · 05/23/22

Unfortunately that is not possible. Feel free to submit a product enhancement request when you have a moment.

Eva · 05/23/22

@ricki It's currently not possible to see more information, but if you go to the activity log, you can request a download to be emailed to the owner of the sheet with the information prior to the deletion. You can then view all the information by looking for the row number.

Other option would be that if it's not a very large amount of information in the row, you can just view the cell history and reenter the information that was deleted. The only issue with this, is that you need to go through every cell separately.

Eva

ricki · 05/23/22

I looked in the activity log and see the details by expanding the row deleted row in the log.

How can I view the cell history of a cell in a row that was deleted?

Paul Newcome · 05/23/22

@ricki You should be able to "request a snapshot" from the activity log. An excel version will then be sent to the sheet owner.

You cannot view the cell history from a deleted row as the cells are deleted when the row is.

Brad Jones · 06/23/22

@ricki

Smartsheet STILL does not have the ability to fully recover deleted rows. Sure, they may be able to send you an Excel style backup, but you lose your: Cell history, conversation thread, attachments, formatting, etc etc etc. You 'might' get the raw cell contents back, but that's basically it. All the super nice features that make the program nice to use - don't get reproduced in their, cough, 'recovery system'.

As it stands, 7+ years on and fully, completely, and unequivocally aware, Smartsheet still has the behavior that if someone can edit a single cell within a row of a sheet - they can delete the entire row! And, they can delete it without even getting a pop-up message to ask them if they're sure they want to delete it! (which is funny, because if they try to unlock it they get a pop-up - but if they try to delete it, they succeed without even being questioned) And, once the row is gone, all of the rich content is gone too. Heck, the backups don't even tie the attachments to a row number, date, or user!?!

Feel free to review the following community posts, and then decide if you'd like to open an enhancement request on this 7+ year old issue.

https://community.smartsheet.com/discussion/37871/deleted-rows/p1

June 2015

https://community.smartsheet.com/discussion/rows-being-removed

August 2015

https://community.smartsheet.com/discussion/revert-old-version-sheet

August 2015

https://community.smartsheet.com/discussion/avoid-shared-person-delete-my-row

August 2015

https://community.smartsheet.com/discussion/conditional-lock

August 2015

https://community.smartsheet.com/discussion/find-deleated-items