Forms Auditing of data

Question

Hi,
This is a general query that i would like to know how others handle within a forms environment.
Now we have throughout the system used a createby, createdate, amendby, amenddate policy were on a pre insert, pre update the fields are populated. But obviosely this does not tell us which fields where changed from what to what only that something on the table was inserted/updated.
So we extended further and wrote some triggers on key fields to make a note of before and after.
I think this is messy and often requires a lot of specific coding to be done. I was wondering how other forms developers handled auditing of data within a forms application.
Thanks

Answer 1

It depends on how detailed the audit needs to be. For most of our Applications we only care whom created the record and whom updated the record last and we handle that the way you first described. For a couple of other Applications we want some more detailed information - such as every update that was ever done to a specific record. On those, we have handled two different ways. For one of our Applications, we want to know who updates specific records and we want these people's OS username and IP Address. For those we have logic in our PRE-INSERT and PRE-UPDATE triggers to extract that information via WEBUTIL and post to an AUDIT table with only the column(s) that were updated. We have another database that we want to know every transaction that ever occured to that table and those we handle through database triggers on the database - not the form. Once again, we only capture the data that was updated - not everything - and that is captured in the AUDIT table. I have another project that I am working on right now to do the exact thing I just mentioned, but it is not working because of CLOB columns. Forms and the database are not playing nicely together so I am not able to capture the CLOB data in the audit table - I have a SR with Oracle on that one right now. Hope that helps.
-mike