Hi Sylvie! It sounds like this is for actions that have completely processed, and you are getting the "new" values from EMPLOYEE, PAEMPLOYEE, etc (e.g. the new values are now the current values)? And you want to know how to pull the previous values from HRHISTORY? If that is correct, here is what I would do: Find the HRHISTORY record(s) with the same BEG_DATE as the EFFECT_DATE (PERSACTHST) of the action to get the "new" values. Then get the HRHISTORY record with the next most recent date for that same FLD_ NBR for the "old" values.
If you need to know what the HRHISTORY FLD_NBRs stand for: Go to PERSACTYPE and look up the action code of your personnel action. For each action code, there are columns FLD_NBR_01 thru FLD_NBR_36. These numbers correspond to the FLD_NBR in PADICT under topic E1. In PADICT, the ITEM_NAME column and the DB_FILE column associated with the FLD_NBR describe what value is being updated and where it is.