SilverStripe Data Change Tracker

Requirements

• SilverStripe 3

Maintainers

• marcus@symbiote.com.au

Description

Record and track changes and deletes of any dataobjects. View changes/diffs in model admin.

Additionally, track add/remove of items in many_many relationships

Installation

Install via composer, run dev/build

composer require symbiote/silverstripe-datachange-tracker

Usage

Add the ChangeRecordable extension to the dataobjects you wish to track

MyDataObject:
  extensions:
    - ChangeRecordable

If you are applying the extension to the SiteTree, use the SiteTreeChangeRecordable extension to record publish/unpublish actions

To track changes to many_many relationships, you must use a custom ManyManyRelationship class, as well as indicate which relationships need tracking. This can be directly configured via the Injector

For example

Injector:
  ManyManyList:
    class: TrackedManyManyList
    properties:
      trackedRelationships:
        - Page_Regions

will track the "Regions" relationship defined on the Page class;

private static $many_many = array(
	'Regions'	=> 'SomeObject',
);

Capturing URL parameters

Set the save_request_vars option to 1, and GET and POST vars will be recorded too.

DataChangeRecord:
  save_request_vars: 1

Ignoring fields

In some cases it may not be desirable to track changes to all fields of an object. You can define ignored fields in your yml config like so:

ChangeRecordable:
  ignored_fields:
    NameOfObjectClass:
      - NameOfField

Or, for the same field name across all objects

DataChangeRecord:
  field_blacklist:
    - Password
    - Email

Also, you may wish to blacklist some request variables from being stored

DataChangeRecord:
  request_vars_blacklist:
    - url
    - SecurityID

Significant Change tracking

Sometimes reporting changes to certain fields to CMS users is desirable (e.g seeing the last time a field was updated). This is handled by SignificantChangeRecordable, which looks for a list of significant_fields.

Example:

TeamMember:
  significant_fields:
    - 'Name'
    - 'Address'
    - 'OfficeNumber'
    - 'Position'
    - 'Mobile'
  extensions:
    - 'ChangeRecordable'
    - 'SignificantChangeRecordable'

Pruning old data

Over time, the data recorded will become overwhelming in size. May not be a problem for you, but if it is you can regularly prune it to retain just (N) months of data at a time. Simply create the PruneChangesBeforeJob from the QueuedJob admin section of the CMS, using a constructor param of something like "-6 months".

The job will restart itself to run each night, to consistently remove the past 6 months of data.

Version details

3.2.0

• Added pruning of data via queuedjobs

3.0.0

• Removed static DataChangeRecord::track() method