Question

I am creating a website that will be used by an accounting dept. to track budget expenditures by different projects.

I am using SQL Server 2008 R2 for the database and ASP.net C# MVC 3 for the website.

What my boss has asked me to do is every time any user updates or creates a project, we need to log that change into a new table called Mapping_log. It should record the whole Mapping row being saved or created, and additionally the user and the datestamp. The notes field will now be mandatory, and the note should be saved to the Mapping_log.

Now when editing the PA, the Notes field will always be empty and below it, it should have a list of the older notes organized by date. I have been looking into maybe using Nlog and Log4net but I have not been able to find any good tutorials for a situation like mine. It seems that those modules are mostly used for error logging, which although important is not exactly what I am try to do at the moment.

I need some direction… does anyone have any advice or tutorials that I could use to learn how I can implement a process that will keep track of changes made to the data by users of the site.

Thanks for your help/advice!

Answer 1

You can consider two new features that SQL Server 2008 introduced: Change Tracking and Change Data Capture.

You could use that and avoid your custom Mapping_log table.

But if you need to apply a more complex -business- rule, perhaps it will better doing that in the application layer, rather than purely in the database.

Regards.