Detecting changes in the model; php yii framework

Question

I'm creating an audit trail module that i will put in a larger system; and i've created a table to store the trail entries , as an "auditor" what i want to see the currently logged on user, the page where he/she is in, what action he/she did, and what were the changes and when...

these are basically what i want to see; my audit trail table looks like:

User| Timestamp| Module Name| Action| Old Value| New Value| Description

i basically had no problem getting the user, by

Yii::app()->session['username'];

the page/module and action by getting the controller's :

$this->module->getName();
$this->action->id;

My problem lies with the changes old value to new value, the edits done by the user. i could sort of "sniff" out what edits/ changes he/she did by literally copying the variables and passing it through my function where i create the log.. How do i do this dynamically?

i sort of want to detect if a certain model's properties or attributes has been changed and see what changes were made so that i could get a detail log...Thanks ! sorry, i'm really trying hard to explain this.

Answer 1

In each model that you want to observe you can write a afterFind() method, where you store the current DB attributes into some private variable, e.b. _dbValues. Then in beforeSave() you verify the current attributes with the ones in _dbValues and create an audit record if there was a change.

After you have this working, you can take it a step further and create a behavior from it. You'd put the private variable, the afterFind() and the beforeSave() method there. Then you can attach that behavior to many records.