My understanding was that a locked row can no longer be changed. Now I found out, that formulars are still changing the results, regardless of the locking status of the row.
This will lead to incorrect results in other tables, once the data for the formulars will be updated. Any chance to undo this?
For example one employee got no off day in the past and this is now changed. If I mark the friday as an off day now, it calculates all the way back to the beginning the friday as an offday and the employee receiving a lot of worked extra hours, which off course is not the case and incorrect.
In the main table there is a selected date for vacation by an employee.
In the second table there is a list of days with checkboxes, incuding the acutal name of the day, e.g. friday.
In the thrid table there is a list of the working days for each employee.
Lets say on the 21.07.2023 which is a friday an employee selects an off day. So it is recognized due to linking and formulars as a day for which a vacation day is needed. As soon as the day is approved by the supervisor the row gets locked.
However, if at some point in the future the employee decides to no longer work on fridays, this change will be done in the second table and the checkbox for friday will be checked. Now, all the already taken off days / vacations days on a friday are new calculated by the formulars and the list of total used vacation days shows a wrong number of days.
As another user of SeaTable I can understand your frustration. But SeaTable is not a standard database software with common functions. The row locking mechanism is, like @rdb explained, limiting user inputs which means manual values changes.
I’ve been facing this “issue” too and had to find a logic to keep the state of formula data. Best way for me was having settings tables which restrict the usage of default values on time periods. Like the project you assign to a user is limited for 3 months. But you have to define the logic in formulas for it by yourself. It’s not easy to figure that out and I know for sure.
Another way would be to write specific scripts that update the data and can identify “locked” rows like you need them and not rely on formulas which just use the current value of the cell.
If row locking would prevent the values in a formula column from being modified, we’d end up in a situation where values in this column do not correspond to the formula. The formula today() would not be today anymore, but potentially another other date.
