In my previous post I looked at using Castle ActiveRecord and class hierarchies & inheritance to automate some tasks related to implementing audit trails in your application. The foundation was laid to ensure some required information, namely the current user and date and time of editing data, was seamlessly integrated into the domain logic. In this post I'd like to show the next step in this process - that of implementing triggers and the tables required to store this audit trail information.

Very often, one of the requirements that an application I'm working on has is that it needs an audit trail. In this post I'm going to go through a technique that will build the foundation which will allow you to add record-based audit trails to your application. We'll look at adding application user information and time stamps to the data using inheritance, as well as overriding some methods in the ActiveRecord base classes to automatically populate these values.

Here's a portion of a screen shot I took earlier yesterday evening: The portion I've highlighted must surely have been a copy-and-paste mistake, as it's totally out of context. More to the point, shouldn't this should have been: (a) proof read by the author (b) proof read by an editor They can argue about who's fault it is :) This started me thinking (again) about issues like this in my line of work. Make no mistake - back in software development land we also have snafu's that slip out into production - like a message box displaying debug information that wasn't commented out before a build. If found...

This is a mini-rant about usability, with a workaround – so excuse me if this isn’t quite in the same vane as my usual posts. I’m pretty sticky about how my file names should be formatted when WMP rips a CD, my preference being: Track Number – Artist – Album – Song Title.ext WMP gives you the option of selecting/arranging fields in any number of ways, and gives you some predefined options for the separator. One of them is the dash, which I have selected, and then I use my trusty Total Commander to do...