Audit Trail

RE: Audit Trail

Stefan Helzle — Thu, 26 Oct 2023 12:04:10 GMT

You are not the first to ask this question. I suggest to search a bit.

RE: Audit Trail

Naveen M — Thu, 26 Oct 2023 11:47:52 GMT

How to implement the field level audit to capture the old value & new value using record approach. we are not using cdt to capture the data. without going to DB Triggers, can we achieve this in appian

RE: Audit Trail

Stefan Helzle — Wed, 08 Mar 2023 11:00:10 GMT

This is an ages old conversation. Which specific questions do you have?

RE: Audit Trail

Bathula Yagna Sai Laxmi — Wed, 08 Mar 2023 10:41:15 GMT

Hi Pratiksha

If you have done the above requirement can you pls help us.

RE: Audit Trail

ManuelHTG — Sat, 15 Dec 2018 08:25:29 GMT

Hi,

Perhaps a stupid question, but how do you implement the DB triggers and how would you later use that data in your application.

Let's say, you want to be able to click on a record and see the audit, with this like: when it was modified, what was modified and who modified it.

Best,

RE: Audit Trail

pratiksha nawale — Fri, 14 Dec 2018 18:37:36 GMT

I prefer below 2 solutions each has there own pros and cons

Implementing Audit Trail Using dedicated Table lets say History and manually making the entry in History table wherever required
e.g
Employee
empId
name

EmployeeHistory
empHistoryId
empId
name
dateAdded

Pros:
1. As you are adding the data in EmployeeHistory table you have tight control over what data you need in EmployeeHistory

Cons
1. Implementing this for all records and updating all process models may increase development and Testing efforts

Database Triggers
1. Implement the database trigger to log the change in history table

Pros
1. Easy to implement

Cons
1. There might be performance hit if you try to update/insert bulk data. Also if production support team executing any data fix script for large volume of data, you may need to switch off the trigger at that time

Thanks
Pratiksha

RE: Audit Trail

Mike Schmitt — Fri, 14 Dec 2018 14:44:14 GMT

Yes, this is certainly a cost / risk inherent in implementing it the way I suggest.

RE: Audit Trail

harrisont606 — Fri, 14 Dec 2018 14:42:53 GMT

My fear with doing it through Appian is that a developer can forget to implement the rule when they make a new process to update a table. This can create costly discrepancies between historical data and current data, especially if the historical data is being consumed by an external report. If you do it with triggers you never have to worry about that (but you could potentially have performance issues).

RE: Audit Trail

Mike Schmitt — Fri, 14 Dec 2018 14:40:35 GMT

I've been involved with building this sort of thing manually within Appian - not always but definitely sometimes capturing field-level changes. For me it's usually been the case that we use a master audit log table, which has specific columns indicating the acting user and date of change, a record ID field and a record type ID field, where the type ID tells us which data type / table it's acting on, and the record ID field tells us which actual row. Then to store record-specific details or field-level change details, or in other cases just a note about the nature of the audit log entry being made, there's a large text field in which we store JSON text, controlled by expression rules we write in Appian. This gives us the ability to have some flexibility in the usage for a fixed table structure, and tweak the granularity of detail we store when needed. For viewing the log data later, a different expression rule decodes the JSON data and usually keys off which record type ID that row has, etc. This method takes some manual work to set up obviously, but the benefit is you have total control over how it acts and is 100% Appian out-of-box.

RE: Audit Trail

harrisont606 — Fri, 14 Dec 2018 13:41:58 GMT

I think DB triggers are the way to go here. If you have massive inserts or updates you may face performance problems though.

RE: Audit Trail

ManuelHTG — Fri, 14 Dec 2018 11:04:48 GMT

the link seems old, just giving an update
community.appian.com/.../audit-history-application

RE: Audit Trail

narasimhaadityac — Tue, 23 Aug 2016 08:31:29 GMT

Hi Angad, We have implemented the field level triggers at the database level through usage of the re usable package and making the partitions and indexes for better performance.

RE: Audit Trail

Stefan Helzle — Tue, 23 Aug 2016 07:35:17 GMT

Check this plugin: forum.appian.com/.../summary

RE: Audit Trail

angadc — Tue, 23 Aug 2016 05:48:39 GMT

Thanks Abhi. I'm familiar with the Audit History App. It doesn't quite meet the needs of our use case, which includes auditing at a field level. The Audit History App and the typical Audit Trail use cases audit at the event/action type level like Created, Approved, etc. We want to be able to log the original and new value for each data value modified.

For example, in a record of Customers, if the name and address was updated, we need to have the original and new values of the two fields in the audit history.

RE: Audit Trail

abhi.jana — Tue, 23 Aug 2016 04:22:56 GMT

This could be helpful - forum.appian.com/.../Generic_Audit_History_Application.html