The Gvers plug-in is designed for use with Grails 1.3.2 and higher.
I created this plug-in to help me store previous versions of domain objects in
a separate table, letting me not have to worry with checking for a "deleted"
or "active" flag whenever presenting data but still having the ability to
recall what price an item sold for or what an address used to be on an account.
The idea is to provide similar functionality to Hibernate Envers, but 100%
implemented using GORM, Groovy, and Grails.
Gvers is designed to provide just a simple way to archive and access previous
versions of an object. If you need to do more complicated actions with your
archived instances other than simply retrieve them, Gvers will not be helpful.
How to use Gvers
================
1) Grab the grails-gvers-X.X.zip from github.com/ziftytodd/gvers.
2) Go to your grails project and run:
grails install-plugin /path/to/zipfile/grails-gvers-X.X.zip
3) Add "static audit = true" to any domain class you wish to have versioned.
All persistent fields and collections will be versioned.
4) Use "save()" or "delete()" as normal when working with your domain objects
to persist them. All the magic happens behind the scenes.
Gvers adds two methods to the audited domain classes: get(id, version) and
getLatest(id)
get(id, version) is intended to load a specific version # of an object based
upon it's id.
getLatest(id) will load the latest snapshot of an object with the specified
id (this is NOT necessarily the same as loading the original object from it's
regular database)
Both of these methods will return a snapshot of the object (or null if it
wasn't found or had been deleted). The object returned is of the same class
as the original object. All persistent fields, including collections, should
be populated appropriately (collections are populated non-lazily). You should
NOT call save or delete on this returned object as it WILL try to save or
delete the object in your regular table.
How are version #'s determined?
===============================
Gvers uses the version field added to all domain objects by GORM as the
revision (or version) number to store in the audit database. Since GORM
increments this field each time a change is made to the object, it represents
the number of changes made and makes for a reasonable revision number to
reference the object's past states by.
What Gvers can do
=================
* Handle simple data types
* Handle enums
* Handle up to 1 level of inheritance
* Handle collections
* Handle embedded objects
What Gvers can't do
===================
* Cannot handle domain objects with composite ids
* Cannot only version specific persistent fields
* Cannot handle domain objects with optimistic locking disabled
* Version #'s are not "global" like in envers. Each object has it's own
version number that does not correspond with what else was changed in the
same transaction.
* You can only query for past versions of an object. You cannot perform
advanced queries on the older versions of objects (see "how it works" below)
A few words about collections
=============================
Versioning objects with collections is not trivial! The only way I could find
to do it "correctly" is to force new versions of any object that the object
being versioned touches (regardless of what side it's on in a collection) --
and to do that recursively! In any non-trivial database, this could result in
a snapshot of the entire database just because a single field was changed on
one object.
Obviously that isn't a workable solution. So I took a "lazy approach". Here's
how Gvers does it. Anytime GORM inserts/updates/deletes an object, Gvers will
version it. Gvers will delay versioning until objects that need to be inserted
have been inserted and assigned their id -- but Gvers won't "reversion"
something that GORM didn't touch.
For example. You have an Author (Thomas Payne) linked to a Book (Common Sense)
through a collection. Let's so both are already inserted and thus have been
versioned. Now say you change the book's title to "More Common Sense" and you
save that change. Most likely, GORM will only update the Book instance and the
Author won't be touched at all. If you do Book.getLatest(bookId), you'd see
the updated title of "More Common Sense" and the correct author being
referenced. However, since Author wasn't touched by GORM, if you call
Author.getLatest(authorId), the book it references will still be the original
version with a title of just "Common Sense". The next time GORM updates the
Author, the latest version of the collection elements would be referenced.
Here's how it works under-the-hood
==================================
A single table is added to your project via the domain class AuditTable. This
table stores ALL version entries. Basic information such as the time the
insert/update/delete was made, along with the current state of the object
being versioned are saved here. Objects are stored as a JSON representation.
You cannot query this table for specific fields of an object or use more
advanced search criteria because the objects are stored in JSON. Gvers is
intended to provide an archive to access old versions of an object, not to do
more specific analysis. If you need more than access to a reference version of
a single past object, then Gvers is probably not what you need.
Questions/Bugs
==============
Feel free to contact me via email: todd@supersites.com
Version history
===============
0.1 - 06/25/10 - Initial release