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[EP-tech] Re: Traceability of record changes

Hi Martin

- No, there’s no existing script to do this.
- It’s been designed this was as a path of least resistance to meet some preservation issues with not storing the state of the object on change.  An XML dump to the filesystem each time the object is written to the database ticks a lot of boxes and was almost free because there was already an XML exporter.

Creating a ‘by field’ view of the history instead of a ‘by commit’ view is a simple matter of parsing the XML and rerendering it.  No rocket science, but XML parsing is computationally expensive, so performance may be slow for items with long and chequered histories.

I’m happy to advise if anyone wants to do the leg-work on this, as long as it’s released as a bazaar package at the end.  It might lead to a training video or two, too.

 

Jisc

Adam Field
SHERPA services analyst developer

From: <eprints-tech-bounces@ecs.soton.ac.uk> on behalf of "martin.braendle@id.uzh.ch" <martin.braendle@id.uzh.ch>
Reply-To: "eprints-tech@ecs.soton.ac.uk" <eprints-tech@ecs.soton.ac.uk>
Date: Monday, 11 January 2016 11:26
To: EP tech <eprints-tech@ecs.soton.ac.uk>
Subject: [EP-tech] Traceability of record changes

Hi,

and a happy and successful 2016!

If one wants to find all eprints for which a given field X has changed its value from A to B, this seems to be quite cumbersome, because the history table only stores the name of the fields that have been modified, but not their content, which is saved in the revisions XML files in the documents directory.

- Is there already a method or script that enables one to do so?
- Why has this been designed this way, and not the way that all changes (which field and which content) are tracked in the SQL database? Whether disk space is used up by the database or in the filesystem should not matter. Having the changes only in the database would facilitate searching a lot; in addition, rollbacks to a given point would be possible.

Best regards,

Martin

--
Dr. Martin Brändle
Zentrale Informatik
Universität Zürich
Stampfenbachstr. 73
CH-8006 Zürich

mail: martin.braendle@id.uzh.ch
phone: +41 44 63 56705
fax: +41 44 63 54505
http://www.zi.uzh.ch
Jisc is a registered charity (number 1149740) and a company limited by guarantee which is registered in England under Company No. 5747339, VAT No. GB 197 0632 86. Jisc’s registered office is: One Castlepark, Tower Hill, Bristol, BS2 0JA. T 0203 697 5800.

Jisc Services Limited is a wholly owned Jisc subsidiary and a company limited by guarantee which is registered in England under company number 2881024, VAT number GB 197 0632 86. The registered office is: One Castle Park, Tower Hill, Bristol BS2 0JA. T 0203 697 5800.