Release 10.1A: OpenEdge Development:
Progress Dynamics Administration

Generic auditing

Throughout an application, various data entries can be added, modified, or deleted. For security and other auditing-related reasons, there must be a way to track these changes by keeping a history of them. As auditing can be required on one or many tables in an application, Progress Dynamics provides a generic method to acquire and store the information.

Progress Dynamics includes a generic auditing procedure as a standard component of each database trigger. If auditing is enabled for the relevant table, Progress Dynamics automatically launches the audit procedure as part of trigger execution for a transaction on that table. Any application user can then review the audit history on a selected record by accessing the Audit function available on the browse toolbar (or File menu) of an control window.

Note: You can also run the auditing procedure manually from within your application business logic. For more information, see OpenEdge Development: Progress Dynamics Basic Development .

Enabling auditing on a table

You must activate a toggle box on the Progress Dynamics entity definition for the table.

To enable auditing on a table:

Choose System Entity Control from the Administration menu bar. The Entity Control window opens, as shown:



In the browse, select the entity record for the table where you want auditing enabled and open it for update by choosing the Modify record function on the toolbar (or File menu). The Entity Maintenance folder window opens.
Activate the Auditing Enabled toggle box and save the record. From this moment, the audit procedure will execute for any transaction on the gsc_language table. The following example enables the gsc_language table for auditing:

Triggering an audit entry

Now that you have activated auditing for a table, you can test it.

To trigger an audit entry:

Choose Application Language Control from the Administration menu bar.
In the Language Control window that opens, select and open the English record for update, as shown:



Choose the Modify record button, then make a change to the Language name field, for example append (Default) to the end, as shown:



Save the record.
Close the Language Maintenance and Language Control windows.

Viewing an audit

You can view audits in the Audit Control window.

To view the audit on the record:

Choose Application Language Control from the Administration menu bar. The Language Control window opens.
Choose File Audit. The Audit Control window opens, as shown:



Open the audit record for viewing. The Audit Details window opens, as shown:



This is a view-only function, because audit records cannot generally be changed in a typical audit situation (whether for legal or other reasons). The Audit Action field is a code that indicates the trigger for the audit:

CRE — CREATE trigger.
AME — WRITE (AMEnd) trigger.
DEL — DELETE trigger.