I actually use the same approach as Hades for createdBy, updatedBy, createdWhen and updatedWhen. In addition to this basic audit logging I also want to log all historical versions together with information about who updated the object.
I've read a little bit about Envers. I didn't want to bring it up since this is an OpenJPA mailing list. It does look interesting but I think it requires Hibernate which I do not intend to go back to. (I'm actually moving away from Hibernate). Also, I'm a bit hesitant to store "copies" of my rows in special audit tables since it also means database migration of those tables. I think serializing the audit log entries and putting them in one column is a better approach from a maintenance perspective. But it would be nice if OpenJPA would provide a callback or some mechanism (even if it's not standard JPA) that would allow further updates/inserts in a callback. Are there any such plans? /Bengt 2011/7/7 Andrew Thompson <at2...@columbia.edu> > You might take a look at how hades > ( > http://hades.synyx.org/static/2.x/site/org.synyx.hades/reference/html/auditing.html) > does something close to what you're describing. Or > http://www.jboss.org/envers > > -Andy > > On Thu, 2011-07-07 at 15:35 +0100, David Goodenough wrote: > > On Thursday 07 Jul 2011, Bengt Rodehav wrote: > > > I'm using OpenJPA for persistence and would like to audit log any > changes > > > made to my entities. I serialize the objects to JSON (with Gson) and > store > > > them in a separate table in the database. Since the audit log needs to > have > > > the correct id's, the audit logging must take place after the entity > has > > > been persisted. > > > > > > I was hoping I could use the @PostPersist and @PostUpdate life cycle > > > callbacks for this. I do seem to have the right information available > and > > > the serialization works fine but I don't know how I can persist my > audit > > > log entries at this point. From what I've read, I'm not allowed to use > the > > > entity manager in a "Post" lifecycle callback which of course makes > this > > > hard. > > > > > > What do you recommend? Is there a good place in JPA/OpenJPA where I > > > automatically can trigger the storing of an audit log entry as > described > > > above. Of course I can move this logic up from the persistence layer to > a > > > place where I can first have the entity manager persist my entity and > then > > > explicitly call another service to do the audit log. However, this is a > > > pretty general mechanism that I would like to have automatic support > for in > > > my framework which is why I would like to have it pushed down into the > > > persistence layer. > > > > > > Any ideas? > > > > > > /Bengt > > You could of course cheat. > > > > While you can not access the entiry manager, there is nothing to stop you > > using JDBC. It would probably not be a good idea to access a table that > > JPA is using, but if this audit trail is write only for this app and only > > read elsewhere that would solve the problem. > > > > David > >
