Auditing

Rationale

Auditing (also known as the auditing trail) guarantees that all the operations on the database:

Are performed in a non-destructive manner.
- This means that it is possible for a DBA to revert changes that have been made.
Every change has indication of when that change was made and who did that change (if the user is known by the system).
- This means that you can see who did what and when.

This feature is only available when using a relational persistence layer.

Note that Orbeon Forms as of Orbeon Forms 2018.2 doesn't provide a user interface for this feature.

For auditing to work meaningfully, Form Runner needs to know who is presently using the application.

When you use a relational persistence layer:

Every table has the following 4 columns:
- created tells you when given the data (e.g. attachment to a form for the orbeon_form_data_attach).
- last_modified tells you when the data was last changed.
- username tells you who did that change.
- deleted tells you if the data is marked as deleted, and hence invisible to users.
Once a row is added to a column, it is never updated or deleted. Only new rows are added.
When data is first added to a table, created and last_modified have the same value. Then, when this data is modified, another row is added: created is copied over and last_modified is set to the current time stamp.
When data is deleted by users, a new row is added. This row is a copy of the latest row for the data that is being deleted, except for last_modified which is set to the current time stamp and deleted which is set to Y.

As of Orbeon Forms 2018.2, it is not possible to disable this feature. However, you can purge old data using SQL as needed.

You can also use the Purge function from the Forms Admin page.