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In my application, I have a several audited entity classes for example the following.
It contains multiple HAS-IS relations to other entities with various hibernate annotations.

@Entity
@Audited
public class Entity implements Serializable {

    private static final long serialVersionUID = 1L;

    @Id
    private Integer Id;

    @ManyToMany
    private Set < Country> affectedCountries;

    @OneToOne
    private Impact impact;

    @Enumerated(EnumType.STRING)
    private Owner owner;

    ...
}

I am analyzing the the audit-trail with the following code snipplet, which return all the attribute values from the audit table entity. 

public List< AuditTrailForm> getAuditTrailEntries(Class< ?> clazz, Serializable id) {
        AuditReader reader = AuditReaderFactory.get(this.getSession());
        List < Number> revNumbers = reader.getRevisions(clazz, id);
        List< AuditTrailForm> forms = new ArrayList();
        Iterator< Number> it = revNumbers.iterator();

        while(it.hasNext()) {

            Number item = it.next();
            Object obj = reader.find(clazz, id, item);
            AuditInfo revision = reader.findRevision(AuditInfo.class, item);

            BeanMap beanMap = new BeanMap(obj);
            HashMap map = new HashMap();

            Set keys = beanMap.keySet( );
            Iterator keyIterator = keys.iterator( );

            while( keyIterator.hasNext( ) ) {
               String propertyName = (String) keyIterator.next( );

                if (beanMap.getType(propertyName).equals(String.class)) {
                   String propertyValue = (String) beanMap.get( propertyName );
                      map.put(propertyName, propertyValue);  
                }
            }   
            Date createdAt = revision.getTimestamp();
            String user = revision.getUser();

            AuditTrailForm form = new AuditTrailForm(user, createdAt, map);
            forms.add(form);
        }
        return forms;
}

Works fine, however this doesn't take into account the traversing the relations in the class.
Could I somehow develop a recursive algorithm, which would detect the type of the object attribute and then do the recursive call?
Is there perhaps a better way to do this altogether?

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  • 1
    I understand the auditing, but I'm a bit puzzled about the purpose of the beanMap and why you extract string valued properties. Can you explain what you want to achieve? Commented Jul 22, 2010 at 22:40
  • Ultimate I want to have a map of "date, user, old value, new value" of the parent and child entities. The problem is that, if I have hibernate relationship C -> <SET>B and somebody changes something in the B entity and new revision of created out of the C entity, but I don't have any means of traversing to the B entity from the C revision. Commented Jul 23, 2010 at 13:58
  • If I understood you comment right: you need to set up cascade update like: @ManyToMany(cascade=CascadeType.ALL) and do to reload object C from DB in your code's spot. Commented Jun 22, 2022 at 11:00

1 Answer 1

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A simpler approach...

I'm assuming that the saves to the object tree happen in a transaction. You could modify the audit tables to also add some unique identifier for each transaction.

That way you would be able to browse the audit history as a collection of change sets - e.g. see all changes made in a single transaction.

Not quite what you are asking for but would be a lot easier to achieve and give many of the benefits. What you are asking for would be very complicated to implement.

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1 Comment

I implemented a messy solution using the code.google.com/p/reflections library to detect the auditable objects and iterating through the collection. It fulfills the requirement at the moment, before the new version of Envers is released.

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