Author Topic: Change Log - that actually logs what changed (Read 8042 times)

petednz · February 24, 2009, 07:21:17 pm

Hi - I know I raised this a year ago or so, but haven't noticed it come up for discussion much. I am reinspired to raise it as I migrate a client away from a system that actually does more recording of changes than civicrm.

The sort of recording I would be particularly keen to see is eg if a phone number is edited or deleted (sparked by the fact that I spotted my cell phone was not showing on one of our installs yet again - and I have no idea what is causing it to keep being lost - but it obviously worries me.)

So just wondering if this on a 'wishlist' or if I can push it on to one. I realise I won't be able to provide much technical input in to how to do this, but keen to start some discussion on the value of it to users.

petednz · February 24, 2009, 07:42:05 pm

IN reviewing the legacy system in question, it makes me wonder if one option for civicrm would be to have a 'add a note' option by the Save function eg on the Summary page - so that if an address is updated, it is the same workflow to throw the info in to an 'add note' box - and when 'save' is hit, that Note gets saved and added to Notes.

Donald Lobo · February 24, 2009, 08:12:32 pm

This is a fairly large undertaking and would need to be either sponsored or contributed work

lobo

stidem · April 14, 2009, 09:53:15 am

Roughly what kind of time would be required if we helped sponsor this project? This particular feature is one of a few that is keeping us from switching to CiviCRM. Are we talking a couple of thousand dollars or 10 to 15 thousand?

Our organization is strongly considering moving away from iMIS (our current system) to something like this. We are working on a list of additions and changes that we would need to see and possibly invest in to make this work. Better accounting history/exports and a better change log are two big ones for us.

--
Scott Idem
Systems & Network Manager
American Astronomical Society
http://aas.org/

Donald Lobo · April 14, 2009, 11:10:38 am

depends on the exact specs of the "archival" process. It is definitely a large project and definitely upward of 10K. The good news is that quite a few folks in our user base want a feature like this, so we could potentially get a few large folks chip in significant chunks to build this feature

Do you want to describe how many fields and objects you want versioned and what you would potentially do with this versioned data (i.e. what operations would you want to perform)

Some systems allow you to version X number of fields / table and display the information on certain screens. You cant really do a lot with that data (other than view what it used to be)

lobo

stidem · April 14, 2009, 12:08:38 pm

I would like to see something similar to the logging our current system has. Nearly every change that is made is logged to a change log table. At the very least we need to know when a name, email, address, status, type, and payments are changed and what they changed from and to.

The iMIS table is almost identical to the civicrm_log currently used. It may be worth creating a log table for each module. So contacts, mailings, events, donations, etc would each have a log table.

Log table from current system:
Fields: date_time, log_type, sub_type, user_id, id, log_text, time_stamp

log_type: just says change in our database (seems useless)
sub_type: just says change or add (not sure the exact reason for this similar field)
id:is the id of the person that updated the record
log_text: looks something like this for every change:
name.First_Name: Scott -> ScottNew
name.Email: asdf@aas.org -> asdf123@aas.org

Don’t ask why they have two date/time fields. Some of what the iMIS creators did makes no sense.

--
Scott Idem
Systems & Network Manager
American Astronomical Society
http://aas.org/

Donald Lobo · April 14, 2009, 12:49:45 pm

If you are interested in sponsoring this feature given our rough budget estimates (10K+) please contact me offline (lobo at yahoo dot com) and we can chat more specifics

For other folks interested in making this happen and willing to help cover part of the costs, please speak up

lobo

Matthew Clarke · April 14, 2009, 01:02:06 pm

this pretty much tops the list of wanted features for me. boring, but pretty fundamental to data integrity IMO.

I'll begin the lobbying process for $$!

stidem · April 14, 2009, 01:33:24 pm

Lobo, I will reply to you directly.

I just want to throw out there that we are still in our initial search for a new membership management system. I am in the processing of emailing other organizations that use CiviCRM to find out how their implementation went and to learn about any problems they have. Sadly a few that responded are moving away from this software because of some of these fundamental limitations, reporting, loging, accouting exports, etc. I would much rather see them come together and invest in this functionality rather then leaving. This seems like a product with a lot of potentional and I love the fact that it is open source.

Sorry if this is a little off topic now.
--
Scott Idem
Systems & Network Manager
American Astronomical Society
http://aas.org/

petednz · April 16, 2009, 01:54:46 pm

I think this is the sort of feature that I would happily go back to each of our clients and say, this has got to be worth $XX from you - and if I can get commitments for 5-10 x $XX then I am sure the rest of the world can do ten times better. I guess I am just trying to find a way to break down your big number in a way that we may be able to help progress it.

So I am thinking "would my clients all agree it was worth $100 to have this feature" - well it seems a no-brainer to me - so if that was replicable in other countries, how many consultants would be able to get their clients to chip in to add this incredibly value feature?

RicardoDavis · June 22, 2011, 06:09:10 am

A quick search didn't turn up any further discussion on this topic. My organization is using CiviCRM 3.1.5 and if 4.x has implemented this then I've got another incentive to upgrade. Or is this still pending?

Coming from the NetSuite world, their entity-level logging is straight-forward. They write a log record that shows when the change was made, who made the change, and the change(s) to the attribute(s) on a create, update, or delete (esp. of child entity data) in a long text field. They use Oracle and I suspect that some triggers are doing the work in this case.

Donald Lobo · June 22, 2011, 11:29:50 am

Check:

http://civicrm.org/blogs/shot/new-civicrm-33-feature-logging

lobo

RicardoDavis · June 27, 2011, 12:53:23 pm

Very nice!

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Author Topic: Change Log - that actually logs what changed (Read 8042 times)

petednz

Change Log - that actually logs what changed

petednz

Re: Change Log - that actually logs what changed

Donald Lobo

Re: Change Log - that actually logs what changed

stidem

Re: Change Log - that actually logs what changed

Donald Lobo

Re: Change Log - that actually logs what changed

stidem

Re: Change Log - that actually logs what changed

Donald Lobo

Re: Change Log - that actually logs what changed

Matthew Clarke

Re: Change Log - that actually logs what changed

stidem

Re: Change Log - that actually logs what changed

petednz

Re: Change Log - that actually logs what changed

RicardoDavis

Re: Change Log - that actually logs what changed

Donald Lobo

Re: Change Log - that actually logs what changed

RicardoDavis

Re: Change Log - that actually logs what changed