Audit-entity generation and automatic auditing

[homedirectory]

Description

The goals of this issue are:

1. Introduce a simple tool to generate audit-entities, which should work similary to the GenDdl tool, which is used in TG applications.
2. Implement automatic auditing, which would automatically create an audit record whenever an audited entity is saved.

It is a non-goal to implement an all-encompassing solution for auditing.
Rather, a minimal, manually controlled tool should be provided with the sole purpose of generating audit-entities, and a basic form of auditing should be implemented, which would use the generated audit-entities.

The tool should accept a set of entity types as input, and generate source code for the corresponding audit-entity types, which should be written to an appropriate location in the project tree.

It is proposed to introduce an abbreviation for the term "audit" - a3t.

Requirements for the general structure of audit-entities:

• Class name follows a standard naming scheme - Entity_a3t_i, where
  • Entity is a placeholder for the simple name of the audited entity;
  • i is a number, representing the version of an audit-entity.
• Contains a reifiable reference to the audited entity (e.g., annotation).
• Extends a basic audit-entity type, which should declare the following service properties, common to all audit-entities:
  • auditDate: Date (key member) - date/time the audited event took place;
  • user: User (key member) - user that performed the audited event;
  • auditTransactionGuid - identifier of the transaction associated with the audit record.
• Declares a key member property that represents a reference to the audited entity.
  For example, if the audited entity was WorkActivity, then such a property would be auditedEntity: WorkActivity.
• Declares all persistent properties of the audited entity.
  • Care should be taken to avoid name collisions with the basic properties¹.
    Names of audited properties should be prefixed with a3t_.
  • Entity-exists validation should be disabled for entity-typed properties.
    This will enable deletion of audied entities while preserving their audit records.

Additionally, an entity type representing a one-to-many association with the audit-entity should be generated. This type should model properties of an audited entity that changed as part of an audit event.
The essential structural elements of this type are:

1. A property that represents the audit-entity (the "one" side of the one-to-many association); should be a key-member.
2. A property descriptor representing the property that changed; should be a key-member.

The structure of audit-entities should include a corresponding collectional property.

Expected outcome

• A minimal tool to generate audit-entities is introduced.
• Automatic auditing is implemented.

Footnotes

1. Basic properties are defined as basic properties + the property that represents a reference to the audited entity. ↩