Working With Rails

Acts As Audited

= acts_as_audited

acts_as_audited is an ActiveRecord extension that logs all changes to your models in an audits table.

Installation

• Install the plugin into your rails app If you are using Rails 2.1:

  script/plugin install git://github.com/collectiveidea/acts_as_audited.git

  For versions prior to 2.1:

  git clone git://github.com/collectiveidea/acts_as_audited.git vendor/plugins/acts_as_audited

• Generate the migration script/generate audited_migration add_audits_table rake db:migrate

Auditing in Rails

If you’re using acts_as_audited within Rails, you can simply declare which models should be audited. acts_as_audited can also automatically record the user that made the change if your controller has a current_user method.

class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
   audit User, List, Item
 protected
   def current_user
     @user ||= User.find(session[:user])
   end
 end

Customizing

To get auditing outside of Rails, or to customize which fields are audited within Rails, you can explicitly declare acts_as_audited on your models:

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  acts_as_audited :except => [:password, :mistress]
end

See http://opensoul.org/2006/07/21/acts_as_audited for more information.

Caveats

Auditing with user support depends on Rails’ caching mechanisms, therefore auditing isn’t enabled during development mode. To test that auditing is working, start up your app in production mode, or change the following options in config/environments/environment.rb:

config.cache_classes = true
config.action_controller.perform_caching = true

Also, if your model declares attr_accessible after acts_as_audited, you need to set rotect to false. acts_as_audited uses attr_protected internally to prevent malicious users from unassociating your audits, and Rails does not allow both attr_protected and attr_accessible. It will default to false if attr_accessible is called before acts_as_audited, but needs to be explicitly set if it is called after.

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  acts_as_audited :protect => false
  attr_accessible :name
end

=== ActiveScaffold

Many users have also reported problems with acts_as_audited and ActiveScaffold, which appears to be caused by a limitation in ActiveScaffold not supporting polymorphic associations. To get it to work with ActiveScaffold:

class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
  audit MyModel, :only => [:create, :update, :destroy]
end

== Compatability

acts_as_audited works with Rails 2.0 or later.

NOTE: This description has been extracted from the Plugin README and so the formatting may need updating to make browser friendly