OpenEdge provides an architecture for adding context to the audit event records in an audit trail. Without audit event context, an audit trail contains a stream of events that have little apparent relationship to one another. Using various audit contexts, you can group audit events together in various combinations. Then, when you want to generate auditing reports, you can report on audit events based on the context or contexts in which they are recorded.

OpenEdge can organize auditing events within the following different event context areas:

You can explicitly control all of these event contexts, except the database transaction context. OpenEdge always generates database transaction context information (transaction ID and sequence values) that is recorded with each auditing event generated during a database transaction. Otherwise, you can generate context information for the remaining context areas that also appears in audit event records using the ABL elements described in this section.

Otherwise, the OpenEdge auditing context architecture allows you to nest these context areas in different ways to organize the auditing events generated by your application. For more information on this auditing context architecture, see OpenEdge Getting Started: Core Business Services - Security and Auditing. The following sections describe how to generate context information for client login sessions, application context, and application event groups.