Sublime Audit Log

[FileMaker Magazine]

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By Matt Petrowsky

Over my many years of FileMaker Pro development, I’ve often heard the following, “Why can’t they just build that feature in?”. This type of request pretty much applies to everything you can think of.

I can even recall wishing personally that simply flipping a switch for automatic audit logging would be nice. While having that wish come true would still be a nice convenience, it would take away from the learning and understanding one can have when implementing such a feature. It may also rob us of the flexibility we so often enjoy when working with FileMaker.

I’ve seen a lot of audit logging solutions and they all have their various approach. Some use a plug-in in order to access the full set of FileMaker’s SQL support. Others take a native approach and simply try to account for all fields on the layout and replicate the data into a single table. I’ve seen complex systems which add a lot of extra fields to a dedicated audit log table where they track the layout, the table occurrence, the base table and more data than may be necessary.

With some solutions, those provided for purchase, you’ll get the full suite of features. These include creates, deletes, changes and rollback support. However, in many cases, you may just need something simple which keeps track of the changes made to records.

In this video, I showcase an advanced level of knowledge wrapped around a very simple approach to audit logging. If you’ve never considered, or even avoided implementing an audit log to your solution, then you may be surprised at how easy it can actually be. This video will provide you with the insight and know-how in order to implement a powerful audit log in a quick and easy fashion.

External links

FMEasyAudit Wikipedia Audit Trail

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