Batch update - blanked out our records

1

Hi all.
I did a batch update over the weekend and today we have logged in and a large portion of our records have been blanked out…sales orders are empty, invoices are gone etc.
I’ve tried to undo through the history button but it doesn’t appear to be fixing the problem.

is there a way of fixing this?

2

Hi @mbooth,

Please share some screenshots of your Sales Orders and other affected tabs as well as your History view of any of the affected transactions

3

Hi @Ealfardan,
Thanks for responding.
Not sure whats happening but I don’t appear to be able to reproduce the issue.
I can see that records prior to a particular date no longer have information in one of the columns. Luckily this column isn’t essential.

For future reference, is there a way of undoing a batch edit if a large number of records are affected?

4

Yes, but it depends on what caused the issue. In case the change is recent and has no other change on top of it blocking its undoing, you can always Undo any single action or even an entire batch of actions right from your History log.

However, your still haven’t provided sufficient information for me to answer you with certainty.

5

Thanks.
Because i can’t reproduce the issue its hard for me to provide further details.

However as a brief overview:
I updated one of our “text custom fields” in sales order to a new “multi-value custom fields”. I did this by creating a new multi-value field and then copied over the data from the previous text custom field using the batch edit function.
We tend to use our sales orders as a bit of a workflow record so we have extra columns in the list beyond the accounting functions of manager. The column / field I was updating reflected the staff allocation for the order because we are finding that we have multiple staff working on an order so its good to be able to select all staff members.
When the update was completed it appears to have blanked out other details like the date, desription, ordered items etc.
As soon as I realised there was an issue I went onto history and tried to undo the updates. It initially looked like this didn’t work but now that I can’t reproduce the issue I’m assuming it has fixed the issue or at least part of the issue as all the records appear to be available again without anything blanked out but only the records since 2022 show the staff details in the new field.

Fingers crossed it doesn’t cause more issues moving forward.

6

I suspect the field old values incompatibily with the new field setup has something to do with the issue. I don’t think there’s anything anyone can do about that now except being more careful not to change data types and instead inactivate the old field and create a new field altogether.

Glad you got this fixed with no significant trouble though.

7

I did this once before with another field and it worked quite well. However it was a straight change where all the text in the fields were identical.

With this one we went from options like Staff A / Staff B to Staff A and Staff B as single and separated options only.

My big take aways from this are:

  • back up everything prior to doing any kind of batch update
  • test on a small amount of information first without doing the entire company database
  • test the action on a test database first so you know it works prior to a larger roll out.

Almost had a complete meltdown when I realised this had happen and I thought I’d lost a large portion of my work database, so I’m glad that there is the history and undo options.

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