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Enable Auditing on an Entity

Goal​

Turn on change auditing for an entity so that every create, update, and delete of its records is recorded — with who or what made the change — and optionally exclude a specific field from being captured.

Prerequisites​

  • You are signed in with a maker (or platform administrator) role.
  • The entity exists (see Create an Entity). Its data table exists from the moment it was created, so there is nothing else to do first.

Steps​

  1. Open the entity in Tables.
  2. Turn on Enable auditing for the entity.
  3. (Optional) For any field that should not be recorded — for example a large, frequently-changing field of little audit value — open that field and turn on Exclude from auditing.
  4. From now on, every create, update, and delete of this entity's records is recorded in the audit log. View it through the Audit Log screen (see View the Audit Log).

What happens behind the scenes​

Auditing is recorded at the data layer, so it captures every change to a record no matter how the change was made — through a form, an app, an automated business rule, or an integration. Each audit entry keeps what changed (the old and new values, minus any excluded field) and who or what made the change: a person, an external application, a business rule, or an automated process, along with the person who originally started the action when one did. Enabling or disabling auditing, and excluding a field, are saved as part of the entity's definition, so they travel with the entity when its Solution is deployed to another environment.

Troubleshooting​

  • Auditing does not seem to record anything yet. The switch takes effect immediately, and only changes made after it was turned on are recorded — earlier ones are not captured retrospectively.
  • A change is attributed to "System" or shows no actor. The change reached the data outside the platform's normal write path (for example a direct database edit). This is itself a signal worth investigating.
  • An excluded field still appears in older entries. Exclusion applies to changes captured after you excluded the field; entries recorded earlier are unchanged.