A report on failed record updates

[Nurture_Ninja]

Is it possible to generate a smart list or report that displays all records that failed to update? For instance, when an individual attempts to modify their job title on a web form for an existing record, but the update fails. Thank you.

[Katja_Keesom · Accepted solution]

Hey there, that is a tricky ask, because it is difficult to report on something NOT happening, which is effectively what you want. There are two directions I am thinking of that could potentially help:

1. You could hypothetically set up a People Performance report with custom columns, where a custom column could be all people having filled out a specific form and any field on the form not having received an update in the same time window. Does not work generically, but only for specific situations you want to monitor for.
2. Assuming the same scenario, if someone tries to fill something out in the form and the value somehow is not accepted, my assumption would be the form doesn't submit and the person does not land on the thank you page. This is something you could monitor for via your Analytics set up.

[KevinH]

Another idea that comes to mind could be to trigger a webhook on form fill, that checks the fields filled by the form against whatever you define as success or failure in the webhook's code. The webhook then could return an answer to a custom Marketo field that states validation success or failure. You could then build reports on that field. 

This would require to set up the webhook though, so this solution would not reside within Marketo alone.  The effort would need to be justified by the importance of the usecase. 

[Jo_Pitts1]

@Nurture_Ninja ,

what's the use case?  Why would the update fail in this instance?

Cheers

Jo

[SanfordWhiteman]

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what's the use case?  Why would the update fail in this instance?

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Yep, I really don’t understand what we’re talking about there. The only situation where field updates “fail” (a very debatable term for it!) is if updates are explicitly blocked in Field Management.

If one wants to know when someone attempted to change a field, the answer is to expose a proxy field on the form (which isn’t blocked from updates) and watch for Data Value Changes on that field.