Question

I’ve created this ASP.Net application and need to record what the users have done for each project on the DB.

I’m using an SQL express database for testing purposes but will migrate it to a SQL Server 2008 when deploying live.

I decided to add to each action some queries that add to a tblLog the data that I want, and then I can see what was done, for example:

Date       Description
3/15/2011 Risk changed from 20 to 50 by xxxx
3/14/2011 Complexity changed from 50 to 40 by xxxx
3/14/2011 Project A removed as Dependency by xxxx
3/13/2011 Project B added as Prerequisite by yyyy
3/12/2011 Project C removed as Prerequiste by yyyy

Now this works fine, except I have to pretty much hard code each query for any possible action… which I’m sure is not the best solution.

So my question: is there a way for me to pull that kind of event log that I can pull from the DB? After all the SQL DB is getting modified so maybe I can pull what happened directly from there. Or is there maybe an even better solution to create an event log?

Thanks

Answer 1

Be careful that the size of this table doesn’t explode on you.

Would it be easier if you split “description” into multiple columns? Maybe:

Date
ChangedTable
Action (add, remove, update)
InitialValue
NewValue
UserID