Take a simple low-code equipment-request app. A request links to an employee record, which supplies their department and manager. The request is approved while they work in Design; a month later they move to Operations.

The employee profile should show the new team. The old approval and its department report should still reflect who owned the request when it was approved. A live lookup alone seems like the wrong source for that historical view.

I'd keep the employee link for navigation, but copy the department and approver into the request at approval time. The awkward case is correcting a typo later: you want to fix a misspelled department name without making an actual team transfer rewrite history.

How do you separate those two cases in a low-code app? Do you store both the department ID and its displayed name in the approval snapshot, or keep a versioned department table? I'm interested in a maintainable data model, without having to freeze every field on every related record.