Auditing

Spring Data ArangoDB version 3 reached End of Life (EOL) and is not actively developed anymore. Upgrading to version 4 is recommended.

Since version 3.0.0 Spring Data ArangoDB provides basic auditing functionality where you can track who made changes on your data and when.

To enable auditing you have to add the annotation @EnableArangoAuditing to your configuration class.

@Configuration
@EnableArangoAuditing
public class MyConfiguration implements ArangoConfiguration {

We can now add fields to our model classes and annotate them with @CreateDate, @CreatedBy, @LastModifiedDate and @LastModifiedBy to store the auditing information. All annotation names should be self-explanatory.

@Document
public class MyEntity {

  @CreatedDate
  private Instant created;

  @CreatedBy
  private User createdBy;

  @LastModifiedDate
  private Instant modified;

  @LastModifiedBy
  private User modifiedBy;

}

The annotations @CreateDate and @LastModifiedDate are working with fields of any kind of Date/Timestamp type which is supported by Spring Data (i.e. java.util.Date, java.time.Instant, java.time.LocalDateTime).

For @CreatedBy and @LastModifiedBy we need to provide Spring Data the information of the current auditor (i.e. User in our case). We can do so by implementing the AuditorAware interface

public class AuditorProvider implements AuditorAware<User> {
  @Override
  public Optional<User> getCurrentAuditor() {
    // return current user
  }
}

and add the implementation as a bean to our Spring context.

@Configuration
@EnableArangoAuditing(auditorAwareRef = "auditorProvider")
public class MyConfiguration implements ArangoConfiguration {

  @Bean
  public AuditorAware<User> auditorProvider() {
    return new AuditorProvider();
  }

}

If you use a type in your AuditorAware implementation, which will be also persisted in your database and you only want to save a reference in your entity, just add the @Ref annotation to the fields annotated with @CreatedBy and @LastModifiedBy. Keep in mind that you have to save the User in your database first to get a valid reference.

@Document
public class MyEntity {

  @Ref
  @CreatedBy
  private User createdBy;

  @Ref
  @LastModifiedBy
  private User modifiedBy;

}

To customize the behavior of deciding whether an entity instance is new or has already been persisted previously, the entity can implement the org.springframework.data.domain.Persistable<ID> interface which is defined as follows:

public interface Persistable<ID> {
    /**
     * Returns the id of the entity.
     *
     * @return the id. Can be {@literal null}.
     */
    @Nullable
    ID getId();

    /**
     * Returns if the {@code Persistable} is new or was persisted already.
     *
     * @return if {@literal true} the object is new.
     */
    boolean isNew();
}

For example, we might want to consider an entity instance new if the field createdDate is null:

@Document
public class Person implements Persistable<String> {

        @Id
        private String id;
        private String name;

        @CreatedDate
        private Instant createdDate;

        @LastModifiedDate
        private Instant modifiedDate;

        @Override
        public String getId() {
            return id;
        }

        @Override
        @Transient
        public boolean isNew() {
            return created == null;
        }

        // ...
}