How to track custom events in paper_trail?

Question

I am using paper_trail for audit trail. Along with create, update and delete events I want to track few custom events like view(record), sent(email) etc. How can we introduce such custom events while auditing a model?

Answer 1

I have found a tweak to add custom events in paper_trail managed Versions. Here is the tweak

Version.create(item_type: "Campaign", item_id: campaign.id, event: "Sent")

May be this is not right solutions but it helped me to achieve the goal. I would explore paper_trail more to find obvious solution.

Please keep posting your suggestions.

Thanks, Amit Patel

Answer 2

See simple hit counter for page views in rails as an answer to the first part of your question. As for tracking sent mails, you may want to use Observer pattern.

In any case all these events are outside of paper_trail domain. While paper_trail simply creates versions of your model during data changing, what you need is to observe custom event and write to DB all necessary information about that event.

Answer 3

Following the paper trail flow, and having paper trail hooked to your touch events:

record.paper_trail_event = 'notified'
record.touch

If you don't want to have that hook in place you can:

record.versions.create!(event: 'notified')

The main problem with the second approach is that it won't apply any of the PaperTrail scoped params, nor any other dynamic field you may have defined for that model PaperTrail config.

You will need to set those manually. For the request.whodunnit it would be like:

record.versions.create!(event: 'notified', whodunnit: current_user.id)