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Auditing

Basics

Spring Data provides sophisticated support to transparently keep track of who created or changed an entity and when the change happened.To benefit from that functionality, you have to equip your entity classes with auditing metadata that can be defined either using annotations or by implementing an interface. Additionally, auditing has to be enabled either through Annotation configuration or XML configuration to register the required infrastructure components. Please refer to the store-specific section for configuration samples.

Applications that only track creation and modification dates are not required do make their entities implement AuditorAware.

Annotation-based Auditing Metadata

We provide @CreatedBy and @LastModifiedBy to capture the user who created or modified the entity as well as @CreatedDate and @LastModifiedDate to capture when the change happened.

An audited entity

class Customer {

  @CreatedBy
  private User user;

  @CreatedDate
  private Instant createdDate;

  // … further properties omitted
}

As you can see, the annotations can be applied selectively, depending on which information you want to capture. The annotations, indicating to capture when changes are made, can be used on properties of type JDK8 date and time types, long, Long, and legacy Java Date and Calendar.

Auditing metadata does not necessarily need to live in the root level entity but can be added to an embedded one (depending on the actual store in use), as shown in the snippet below.

Audit metadata in embedded entity

class Customer {

  private AuditMetadata auditingMetadata;

  // … further properties omitted
}

class AuditMetadata {

  @CreatedBy
  private User user;

  @CreatedDate
  private Instant createdDate;

}

Interface-based Auditing Metadata

In case you do not want to use annotations to define auditing metadata, you can let your domain class implement the Auditable interface. It exposes setter methods for all of the auditing properties.

`AuditorAware`

In case you use either @CreatedBy or @LastModifiedBy, the auditing infrastructure somehow needs to become aware of the current principal. To do so, we provide an AuditorAware<T> SPI interface that you have to implement to tell the infrastructure who the current user or system interacting with the application is. The generic type T defines what type the properties annotated with @CreatedBy or @LastModifiedBy have to be.

The following example shows an implementation of the interface that uses Spring Security’s Authentication object:

Implementation of AuditorAware based on Spring Security

class SpringSecurityAuditorAware implements AuditorAware<User> {

  @Override
  public Optional<User> getCurrentAuditor() {

    return Optional.ofNullable(SecurityContextHolder.getContext())
            .map(SecurityContext::getAuthentication)
            .filter(Authentication::isAuthenticated)
            .map(Authentication::getPrincipal)
            .map(User.class::cast);
  }
}

The implementation accesses the Authentication object provided by Spring Security and looks up the custom UserDetails instance that you have created in your UserDetailsService implementation. We assume here that you are exposing the domain user through the UserDetails implementation but that, based on the Authentication found, you could also look it up from anywhere.

`ReactiveAuditorAware`

When using reactive infrastructure you might want to make use of contextual information to provide @CreatedBy or @LastModifiedBy information. We provide an ReactiveAuditorAware<T> SPI interface that you have to implement to tell the infrastructure who the current user or system interacting with the application is. The generic type T defines what type the properties annotated with @CreatedBy or @LastModifiedBy have to be.

The following example shows an implementation of the interface that uses reactive Spring Security’s Authentication object:

Implementation of ReactiveAuditorAware based on Spring Security

class SpringSecurityAuditorAware implements ReactiveAuditorAware<User> {

  @Override
  public Mono<User> getCurrentAuditor() {

    return ReactiveSecurityContextHolder.getContext()
                .map(SecurityContext::getAuthentication)
                .filter(Authentication::isAuthenticated)
                .map(Authentication::getPrincipal)
                .map(User.class::cast);
  }
}