JBoss Envers ManyToOne Auditing

Question

Hypothetical scenario: I have two models: Author and Book. The Book model has a many-to-one relationship for Author.

Let's say that I only want to audit changes to Book. I annotate the class with @Audited, but get an error complaining that the getAuthor() property of Book can not be audited since Author is not audited.

Why is this? I want to audit if the author of the book changes, but I don't care if the authors nickname changes. It doesn't make sense for to have an author_aud table in my database, but apparently this is not possible unless I go ahead and audit the Author model OR specifically annotate the getAuthor() property with an @Audited(...) with a property to ignore the relationship. However, if I do this I will no longer be able to audit the book/author relationship.

Answer 1

You will probably not be able to audit the book and it's author relationship if the author is not audited. Maybe you should change the way the relation is mapped : it's strange to have a book "own" it's author : I would have done an unidirectionnal manyToOne relationship from author to its books. With this conception, you will be able to audit the books without auditing the authors.

Answer 2

Add this mapping to the ManyToOne relation.

@Audited( targetAuditMode = RelationTargetAuditMode.NOT_AUDITED )