Field Audit Trail

Field audit trail

Comflow offers the possibility to get detailed audit information of user operations that are performed on a specific field in a specific table. The Field change audit trail task is used to enable such audit trail.

When enabling audit on a field you are creating what, from here on, is called an audit trail rule.

Selecting the Field change audit trail task will take you to its main portlet as below.

Figure 227 Field change audit trail main portlet

Table 137 Field change audit trail main portlet fields

Table 138 Field change audit trail main portlet button options

Create an audit trail rule – By example

In this example we will create an audit trail rule that enables audit on all fields in the “ItemMaster” table.

1. Right click the Field change audit trail main portlet and choose Create as below:

Choose the desired Realm, MetaDataId and Table (F4 prompting is enabled on the table field):

Press the Create button:

Select the desired columns (here all) on which field audit trail should be enabled and press Update as below:

Check the Enabled check box for the created field change audit trail:

Finally, press the Update button:

The field change audit trail for all columns in the ItemMaster table is now enabled (please also see the example below)!

Below is an example of what a field change audit trail can look like. Here we are looking at item details for an item that is registered in the ItemMaster table (for which we have enabled field change audit trail on all columns):

Suppose I want to see audit information for the Volume field. I just highlight the Volume field and press F9. By doing that I will get presented with detailed audit information about the Volume column:

From the last row we can see that the user comact has changed the Volume attribute (for this specific item) from 0.000 to 20.000 at 09:33:41 on the third of September 2007.

View an audit trail rule

To view a defined field audit trail rule, right click the rule and choose View as below.

Figure 228 Right click – View field audit trail rule

This will take you to a non editable field audit trail detail view:

Figure 229 View field audit trail rule details

Table 139 View field audit trail rule button options

Update an audit trail rule

To update a defined field audit trail rule, right click the rule and choose Update as below.

Figure 230 Right click – Update field audit trail rule

This will take you to an editable update view as below:

Figure 231 Update field audit trail rule

Table 140 Update field audit trail rule button options

Delete an audit trail rule

To delete a defined field audit trail rule, right click the rule and choose Delete as below.

Figure 232 Right click – Delete field audit trail rule

Figure 233 Delete field audit trail rule

Table 141 Delete field audit trail rule button options

Methodology

This chapter will describe best practices for setting up authorization.

1. First look at the tasks (chapter 3) and divide them into task groups (chapter 4). Note that some Comflow applications have pre defined task groups (see the user manual for that specific application for more information).

With the task groups in mind create user groups (chapter 2).

Create users (chapter 1) and associate them with user groups. A user is always part of a user group in a well defined system.

When user groups and task groups are created associate task groups (or single tasks) to user groups using Function Authorization (chapter 5). It is also possible to associate single users to single tasks or task groups. Most preferable is to associate in the following order:

Task groups to user groups (use this as far as possible)

Tasks to user groups

Task groups to users

Tasks to users

If desired define authorization rules for users/user groups to specific columns using data authorization table (chapter 6) or data authorization column (chapter 7).