Question

I have a web application that inserts/updates/deletes records from a database. Each time a transaction is made to a table, the change is recorded with the type of modification and the previous values from a trigger. What is a good web user interface layout to view such transactions to the users? Currently we just dump the whole history table to the user in a html table row and column format. I’m looking for some interface hints to present these edit history better.

Thanks for your input.

Answer 1

You can use a grid representation of the database table, plain html or produced by a js framework, plenty of options out there.

For the newly inserted records with no updates, just show the record with the insertion datetime.

For records that have been updated you can add a link/button at the end of the row with a title like “history” or “previous versions” or somethink like that and when a user clicks on it, then you can open a subgrid under this record or a pop up with a new grid (depends how you will implement your grid on the first place) which will show this record’s history only.

The deleted records, you can add them (at the bottom of the table maybe) but grayed out or striked out. Again you can add the history option if you want it even for deleted records.

EDIT:
You could also add some filtering functionality above your grid for the user to select/see only the inserted/updated/deleted records and of course sorting functionality on the grid columns