Whodunnit == User object?

[toobulkeh]

I really like Audited's and PublicActivity's methods of tying to the user who performed the edit.. even if that user could eventually be deleted.

I think it would be beneficial if papertrail supported something more than a string. Essentially just a polymorphic association instead of just a single string.

[batter]

You are suggesting adding a custom accessor on the PaperTrail::VersionConcern module?

[toobulkeh]

Hey Ben,
Not quite. I'm suggesting that the VersionConcern also belongs_to :user, :polymorphic => true so that instead of just :whodunnit we have :user_type and :user_id. Ala PublicActivity. This way we can do more specific user filtering for displaying audit logs based on User data instead of storing it in the current unassociated mechanism.

Here's how PublicActivity implements it: https://github.com/pokonski/public_activity/blob/master/lib/public_activity/orm/active_record/activity.rb#L12

[jaredbeck]

Dan, I think you can accomplish this by implementing your own PaperTrail::Version class:

# app/models/paper_trail/version.rb
module PaperTrail
  class Version < ActiveRecord::Base
    include PaperTrail::VersionConcern
    belongs_to :user, :polymorphic => true
  end
end

You'd store the user_id in version metadata I guess.

I have some concerns about building this into paper_trail the gem.

1. Not everyone has a User model
2. Most people do have a User model, but don't need a polymorphic association
3. How would it work when the associated user is deleted?
4. What happens when people want to configure the association, e.g. passing other options to belongs_to?

[jaredbeck]

Dan, I'm going to close this, but please let me know if my suggestion doesn't work for you, and I'll be happy to reopen it.

[toobulkeh]

Great thoughts and notes @jaredbeck -- I really appreciate the feedback. I think that workaround will work, though it's a bit wordy (a few helper methods should solve that though).

If you leave the association as a polymorphic one, then anyone can use the relationship for any reason. That should answer your questions 1,2,4. PublicActivity handles deleted records quite nicely, with the default recipe checking on .present? and suggesting the user respond with which has since been deleted in the visual / view / partial layer.