I am really pleased to announce the long awaited feature of Audit Trail Professional. We have been talking about adding the ability to undo changes to Audit Trail for almost as long as the product has been around so I am really pleased that we are now releasing the first version of the undo functionality (yes there will more soon). The reason it took a while to do was two fold.

Firstly in the early versions of Audit Trail we did not have enough information about exactly where the values were coming from. We stored the names of the locations and the values which suited a user as they could see exactly where the values used to come from. An application that is supposed to undo that change however needs some more information. It needs to know exactly which object, which child object and, in the case of a phone or email, which child object’s child! That was why a couple of releases ago we enhanced the main audit database table to account for this.

Implementing undo was not as simple though as putting the value back. For example what would happen if the record had been deleted? Do we recreate the whole record to put the one value back? What happens if after recreating a deleted record there are now new required fields that were not present when the record was deleted? It may be that, say, the primary addressee and primary salutation fields had been made mandatory in config. Now even if we recreate the record we are not able to save the record as we don’t have a value for these fields.

There were a lot of questions to answer and to deal with. There still are. In this first instance we allow you to revert the changes to records that currently exist. However that does not mean the changes will always be allowed. For example even though you can change the gift post status to “Posted” it is not possible to undo that and put it back.

You can read more about the changes on our main web site