Auditing of virtual attributes (e.g. tag_list)

[ledermann]

I would like to audit virtual attributes, which are not stored as columns in the same table. Think about a “tag_list” managed by acts_as_taggable_on. This virtual attributes are stored elsewhere, but the changes should be audited in the owner model.

Perhaps this could be configured by an additional option like :add in addition to :except.

[bkeepers]

I don’t know if this is possible. acts_as_audited depends on Active Record’s dirty tracking, which detects changes to attributes. I wouldn’t be opposed to adding this, if you could come up with a clean implementation.

Another idea I had was to allow auditing of any arbitrary data with a record. For example, if I wanted to store the IP of the user. I haven’t come up with a good API for it yet, but here are a couple ideas:

```
@record.audit :ip => remote_address
@record.save

1. or
   @record.save :ip => remote_address
   ```

[ledermann]

Hm, after some investigation I think it would be better to tell other plugins (like acts_as_taggable etc.) to “make the model dirty”, so e.g. after setting tag_list to a new value, the “changed_attributes” hash should reflect this change.

[bridiver]

did anyone ever come up with a working solution to this? It's a problem I'm looking at right now

[bridiver]

I'm looking into the "dirty" method, but I'm wondering if it might affect partial_updates?

[bkeepers]

I don't know of anyone that is working on this yet.

[bridiver]

what do you think of this? Rather than try to come up a generic API, you just add whatever you need to changed_methods hash. I changed self[attr] to send(attr), it didn't break any tests and I can't see that it would cause any problems.

--- a/lib/acts_as_audited.rb
+++ b/lib/acts_as_audited.rb
@@ -97,6 +97,11 @@ module CollectiveIdea #:nodoc:

   module InstanceMethods

•    # Add methods to be tracked
  

•    def changed_methods
  

•      @changed_methods ||= {}
  

•    end
  

•  # Temporarily turns off auditing while saving.
   def save_without_auditing
     without_auditing { save }
  

  @@ -164,8 +169,8 @@ module CollectiveIdea #:nodoc:
  private

   def audited_changes
  

•      changed_attributes.except(*non_audited_columns).inject({}) do |changes,(attr, old_value)|
  

•        changes[attr] = [old_value, self[attr]]
  

•      changed_attributes.merge(changed_methods).except(*non_audited_columns).inject({}) do |changes,(attr, old_value)|
  

•        changes[attr] = [old_value, send(attr)]
       changes
     end
   end
  

then I used this method in my class to audit the tag list

audit tag changes

def set_tag_list_on_with_audit(context,new_list, tagger=nil)
# Audit.reconstruct_attributes will send an array to repopulate this for revisions
new_list = new_list.join(',') if new_list.is_a? Array
old_value = send("#{context.to_s.singularize}_list").map(&:strip).sort
changed_methods["#{context.to_s.singularize}_list"] = old_value unless old_value == new_list.split(',').map(&:strip).sort
set_tag_list_on_without_audit(context,new_list, tagger)
end
alias_method_chain :set_tag_list_on, :audit

[bridiver]

sorry about the formatting

[bridiver]

http://github.com/johnsbrn/acts_as_audited/commit/4fe071a58ff16fe558643d2ebcfb2e7daf97f3cd

[kennethkalmer]

Doing some house cleaning and closing here.

If you guys want to take a stab at this again, we're now using Rails 3 and maybe ActiveModel makes this easier to achieve. The contribution guidelines in the README have been updated to show the new branches and suggestions for pull requests.

Thanks !

[tquill]

Got acts_as_taggable working correctly with this the around_audit callback like this:

def around_audit
  current_audit = yield
  if current_audit.audited_changes.has_key?("tag_list")
    current_audit.audited_changes["tag_list"][1] = self.tag_list
    current_audit.save
  end
end

[kayzee]

@tquill I found that this doesn't work with the first version of an object.
The first audits record will be a 'create' but it doesn't contain any associated (tag_list) values.
Subsequent audits records will include any changes to tag_list as planned.

I also added self.tag_list.join(',') because the previous revision wasn't "reifying" properly.

def around_audit
  current_audit = yield
  if current_audit.action.eql?('create')
    current_audit.audited_changes['tag_list'] = tag_list.join(', ')
    current_audit.save
  elsif current_audit.audited_changes.key?('tag_list')
    current_audit.audited_changes['tag_list'][1] = tag_list.join(', ')
    current_audit.save
  end
end

[kayzee]

@tquill the solution you suggested is incomplete. It only works for self.tag_list and does not keep track of self.tags.

The latter always returns the latest tags no matter what revision you are trying to reify. I was playing around with adding audited to the Tag model, but that just saves the audit trail of each Tag.

class Tag < ActiveRecord::Base
  audited
end

[johnknapp]

@kayzee Your custom callback really helped me out. Thanks! Though I'm curious why you didn't address the update action? (For the Model I'm auditing, assigned tags change occasionally during update so I needed to add that.) Anyway cheers from 2018! (with a cc to @tquill)