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POHow to create a full Audit log in Rails for every table?
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copied!<p>We recently began a compliance push at our company and are required to keep a full history of changes to our data which is currently managed in a Rails application. We've been given the OK to simply push something descriptive for every action to a log file, which is a fairly unobtrusive way to go.</p> <p>My inclination is to do something like this in <code>ApplicationController</code>:</p> <pre><code>around_filter :set_logger_username def set_logger_username Thread.current["username"] = current_user.login || "guest" yield Thread.current["username"] = nil end </code></pre> <p>Then create an observer that looks something like this:</p> <pre><code>class AuditObserver < ActiveRecord::Observer observe ... #all models that need to be observed def after_create(auditable) AUDIT_LOG.info "[#{username}][ADD][#{auditable.class.name}][#{auditable.id}]:#{auditable.inspect}" end def before_update(auditable) AUDIT_LOG.info "[#{username}][MOD][#{auditable.class.name}][#{auditable.id}]:#{auditable.changed.inspect}" end def before_destroy(auditable) AUDIT_LOG.info "[#{username}][DEL][#{auditable.class.name}][#{auditable.id}]:#{auditable.inspect}" end def username (Thread.current['username'] || "UNKNOWN").ljust(30) end end </code></pre> <p>and in general this works <em>great</em>, but it fails when using the "magic" <code><association>_ids</code> method that is tacked to has_many :through => associations.</p> <p>For instance:</p> <pre><code># model class MyModel has_many :runway_models, :dependent => :destroy has_many :runways, :through => :runway_models end #controller class MyModelController < ApplicationController # ... # params => {:my_model => {:runways_ids => ['1', '2', '3', '5', '8']}} def update respond_to do |format| if @my_model.update_attributes(params[:my_model]) flash[:notice] = 'My Model was successfully updated.' format.html { redirect_to(@my_model) } format.xml { head :ok } else format.html { render :action => "edit" } format.xml { render :xml => @my_model.errors, :status => :unprocessable_entity } end end end # ... end </code></pre> <p>This will end up triggering the <code>after_create</code> when new <code>Runway</code> records are associated, but will not trigger the <code>before_destroy</code> when a <code>RunwayModel</code> is deleted.</p> <p>My question is... Is there a way to make it work so that it will observe those changes (and/or potentially other deletes)?<br> Is there a better solution that is still relatively unobtrusive? </p>

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