The AuditTrail package
Use the AuditTrail package to specify which records are to be audited
when they are created or changed. When you enable a record type for audit
trailing, all changes to records of that type are audited. You can also disable
audit trails for any record type for which they have been enabled.
AuditTrail data
An audit trail describes the sequence
of events that have affected a record that is being audited. For each event,
the following information is recorded:
- User identity. The AuditTrail package records the user name and group memberships of the person who made the change. The user full name (obtained from the fullname field of the Rational® ClearQuest® user table) is also recorded.
- Time of change. The time stamp of the change is recorded. To eliminate ambiguity in its interpretation, the time stamp includes a time zone that you must specify as Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), the time zone of the client, or the time zone of the database server.
- Action and state. The action that changed the record and the state of the record after the event is recorded. Information is never deleted from an audit trail. When an audited record is deleted, an entry is made in the audit trail (which is separate from the record) with the action DELETE and the state DELETED.
- Changed fields. For each data field in the record that was changed by the event, the audit trail records the name of the field, its old value, and its new value. For a multiline text field, the audit trail by default shows the full old and new fields. In an append-only field, such as the Notes field, the latest text is appended to the top of the field but old text is never changed. In this case, the audit trail displays only the latest text.
Data display
Applying the AuditTrail package to a record type creates a tab that displays the audit trails for records of that type. The page contains no editable fields.
Data storage
Only the most recent change to a record is stored in an audited record. The complete audit trail is stored in a separate database table, along with the audit trails of all audited records. The table links each record to every change made to the record. It also records the database schema version that was used to describe the record.