Soft-write actions
A soft-write is a PI action that touches a record owned by someone else, like approving a member's purchase, assigning a member to a task, or flagging a note for review. Each action writes a row to the audit log so cross-member writes stay accountable. Posting a lab announcement is the PI's own broadcast and does not touch a member's record.
The four soft-write categories
Purchase approval and decline
Pending purchases appear on the Approvals page at /approvals, reachable from the What needs you hero on the Lab Overview. Each item in the queue has two inline controls.
- Approve. Flips the purchase's status to approved and writes an audit row. The member sees the approval on their own Purchases page on the next refresh.
- Decline. Flips the status to declined and stamps a
declined_attimestamp. APurchaseDeclinedBadgeappears wherever that purchase is displayed.
A declined purchase can be re-approved from the same Approvals page. This is useful when the original decline reason resolves without forcing the member to re-create the purchase from scratch.
Task assignment
On any task popup the PI sees an Assign to member control above the description. Pick a member from the dropdown and the task's assigned_to field updates. The audit row captures the actor (the PI), the record id, and the old and new assignee via thefield_path.
Assigning a task does not move ownership. The original creator still owns the file on disk. The assignment surfaces on the assignee's home page and in the member workload panel on the Lab Overview.
Flag for review
A PI can flag any task, note, or purchase as needing review. The affordance is a Flag button on the host record popup. Flagged items appear in the Lab Overview What needs you hero and on the Approvals page. The member also sees a flag stripe on their own copy of the record. The member resolves the flag by clicking Resolve, which writes a resolve row to the audit trail.
Announcements
Announcements are a lab-wide PI broadcast covered on their own page. Unlike the soft-writes above, posting an announcement does not touch any member's record. A logged-in PI posts directly from the composer on the Lab Overview. See Announcements.
The confirm-once gate on member record edits
Soft-writes that change a member's record go through a one-time confirm dialog per record. The first time you edit a given record in a browser session the app asks whether you mean to edit that member's work. After you confirm, that record stays freely editable for the rest of the session. There is no password and no timer. See Edit as lab head for the full flow.