RELATED IDEAS
Expression Engine: Identify and Highlight Modified Fields Only
Business Need
In many approval workflows, reviewers and approvers need to quickly understand what changes were made before approving an entity. Currently, when an item enters a workflow step, there is no straightforward way to identify which specific fields were modified in the latest save operation.
As a result, approvers often need to manually review all fields on the entity, which becomes time-consuming and inefficient, especially for products with a large number of attributes.
Proposed Enhancement
It would be very helpful if the Expression Engine provided a built-in function, such as:
MODIFIEDFIELDS()
This function could return the list of fields that were changed during the most recent save operation, optionally including:
Field name
Previous value
New value
Last modified timestamp
Workflow Use Case
A common scenario is:
Editor updates one or more fields.
Entity is submitted for approval.
Approver receives a workflow task.
Instead of reviewing the entire product record, the approver could immediately see only the fields that were modified since the last approval cycle.
This would:
Reduce review time.
Improve approval efficiency.
Minimize the risk of overlooking important changes.
Provide greater transparency during the approval process.
Suggested Enhancements
In addition to MODIFIEDFIELDS(), the following functions could provide even greater flexibility
PREVIOUSVALUE(fieldname)
CURRENTVALUE(fieldname)
FIELDHISTORY(fieldname)
These functions could be used within:
Workflow notifications
Email templates
Business rules
Expressions
Approval summaries
