Tracking changes to all models in Django

Question

I am working on a Django + DRF Web Application and I want to track changes to all model instances in the Database and keep a log of all changes made, namely:

TABLE - Table to which record was added/modified
FIELD - Field that was modified.
PK_RECORD - Primary Key of the model instance that was modified.
OLD_VAL - Old Value of the field.
NEW_VAL - New Value of the field.
CHANGED_ON - Date it was changed on.
CHANGED_BY - Who changed it?
REVISION_ID - Revision ID of the current Model Instance.

Later on, I want the user to be able to track the changes made to the model and see which version of the instance was used for a particular action so everything can be tracked.

For this purpose, I tried to understand the various packages in django for tracking database model changes, some of them listed here:

django-model-audit packages

I tried django-reversion, django-simple-history, django-audit-log, django-historicalrecords, but I fail to understand how and why I should use each of these packages as some of them seem like an overkill for the requirements. So, after two days of searching and reading through numerous posts about how I should be tracking model changes, I have basically done nothing.

I am new to Django and would appreciate any help.

If something is not clear, feel free to comment your queries. Thanks in advance :)

Answer 1

Have you explored on django signals pre_save?https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/signals/

from django.db.models.signals import pre_save          
from django.dispatch import receiver
from myapp.models import MyModel

@receiver(pre_save, sender=MyModel)
def my_handler(sender, instance=None, **kwargs):
    # instance variable will have the record which is about to be saved. 
    # So log your details accordingly.