airblade / acts_as_audited forked from collectiveidea/acts_as_audited

= acts_as_audited

acts_as_audited is an ActiveRecord extension that logs all changes to your models in an audits table.

The purpose of this fork is to store both the previous values and the changed value, making each audit record 
selfcontained.

== Installation

* Install the plugin into your rails app
  If you are using Rails 2.1:

    script/plugin install git://github.com/collectiveidea/acts_as_audited.git

  For versions prior to 2.1:

    git clone git://github.com/collectiveidea/acts_as_audited.git vendor/plugins/acts_as_audited

* Generate the migration
    script/generate audited_migration add_audits_table
    rake db:migrate

== Auditing in Rails

If you're using acts_as_audited within Rails, you can simply declare which models should be audited.  acts_as_audited 
can also automatically record the user that made the change if your controller has a <tt>current_user</tt> method.

  class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
    audit User, List, Item
  protected
    def current_user
      @user ||= User.find(session[:user])
    end
  end

== Customizing

To get auditing outside of Rails, or to customize which fields are audited within Rails, you can explicitly declare 
<tt>acts_as_audited</tt> on your models:

    class User < ActiveRecord::Base
      acts_as_audited :except => [:password, :mistress]
    end

See http://opensoul.org/2006/07/21/acts_as_audited for more information.

== Caveats

If your model declares +attr_accessible+ after +acts_as_audited+, you need to set +:protect+ to false. acts_as_audited 
uses +attr_protected+ internally to prevent malicious users from unassociating your audits, and Rails does not allow 
both +attr_protected+ and +attr_accessible+. It will default to false if +attr_accessible+ is called before 
+acts_as_audited+, but needs to be explicitly set if it is called after.

  class User < ActiveRecord::Base
    acts_as_audited :protect => false
    attr_accessible :name
  end

=== ActiveScaffold

Many users have also reported problems with acts_as_audited and ActiveScaffold, which appears to be caused by a 
limitation in ActiveScaffold not supporting polymorphic associations. To get it to work with ActiveScaffold:

  class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
    audit MyModel, :only => [:create, :update, :destroy]
  end

== Compatability

acts_as_audited works with Rails 2.0 or later.