Symptoms
A text field control is added to a SharePoint list with the option "Append Changes to Existing Text" enabled (must also have versioning turned on for this list).
After Appifying this list, the functionality of this text field is lost. The control will still append changes, but on the Edit and Display SmartForms only the most recent entry is shown, and information as to who submitted the entry is not displayed (as it is when using the OOB SharePoint form).
Diagnoses
The utilization of a text area control to show a log of appended changes, along with a time stamp and the person who made the change, is not an OOB feature through Appit. Because SharePoint saves these changes as "versions" for the text field, Appit will update the SmartObject that is storing the entries with the latest entry, along with the appropriate version number. However, the data from previous entries/versions of the control are not saved within the SmartObject. This can be seen by visiting K2 Management and Executing the Get List Items method of the specific SmartObject for the list. A list item will only show the most recent change for the control along with the version number.
Resolution
The same functionality can be achieved by creating a custom SmartBox object to store individual entries from a text area control (a many-to-one relationship of the custom SmartBox to the list item SmartObject, also storing the associated ID from the list item), then creating a list view that calls the "Get List Items by ID" method of the custom SmartBox, where the ID is the list item ID. This will populate the list view with the individual submissions to the text area control.
Also, if you would like the text area control to load on the Edit form as a blank field, a rule can be set up on the form level to set the properties of the control, checking the box for the "Text" parameter and leaving the entry blank. This will effectively put an empty string value into the field on form load, mimicking the equivalent behavior of the SharePoint form.
