When Retool releases under-the-hood changes that we can't opt out of or coordinate, it affects release of working changes because instead of having a nice discrete release, we end up with dozens or even hundreds of trivial additions/modifications to components, making it:
a) difficult if not impossible to distinguish why a hypothetical problem began occurring
b) noisy to view the diff to see our actual changes, vs. Retool's
I'm in the habit of performing a "Compare changes" step before I begin editing, but it's easy to forget and sometimes it seems a blanket under-the-hood change occurs mid-way through my editing; often times it is not feasible to undo all my changes to just release Retool's changes separately.
See screenshot below, featuring the addition of error: null fields on many of my app's components, which happened moments ago.
(Note: redacted areas look a bit odd but wanted to make sure I didn't include any sensitive company info. Assume normal query URLs and component names.)
Hi @dguzzo,
I filed this request internally and the team is following up with some additional questions.
What are the exact changes that you would like to be shown?
Would this be shown per app, or per component of each app?
Where would this changelog be located?
What are the exact changes that you would like to be shown?
Just whatever changes are shown now. Perhaps annotated as "Retool change" vs unannotated/default user changes would be nice.
But could get complicated when both user and Retool edits exist on the same component. The prompt aspect of #3 below could help address this.
Would this be shown per app, or per component of each app?
Just how "Compare changes" diff works currently, which is sort of both, I guess: all changes per app broken down by component.
Where would this changelog be located?
I think the changelog could be folded into the existing one, perhaps with the annotations I mention in #1.
Additionally, a prompt of some sort could be useful before I begin editing: "Retool has pending [under-the-hood] component changes; would you like to release them separately as a draft?"
I realize that latter addition could be complicated from a UI/UX standpoint. Some editors won't care what's going on under the hood or that their releases may include Retool changes. But others, like me, do, because it allows us better control and more transparency, hopefully yielding easier to debug apps.
I'm assuming this is because some under-the-hood Retool-side change is touching every or nearly every component. Or it's just some sort of formatting change.
Either way, it makes it very difficult to have my own changes mixed in, and I'd prefer to be able to see/know, in some fashion, what about my app's underlying code changed.
On one app I intentionally clicked "Revert to this version" on the latest published release while in Edit mode, to intentionally clear the ground in case it was something unintentional, but I suspect the same blanket update would just get reapplied at some future time by Retool.
