Play! Framework Historical Data Changes

Question

I have an application I'm building in Play! Framework with a bunch of data that I would like to track changes to. In a enterprise solution, I would likely use database triggers to copy the changes to a historical table to track those changes. I am not familiar with a similar paradigm in Play!/JPA, but maybe I'm missing something. Is there a decent way to do this other than me creating a copy of all of my entities and manually copying the data from the old/unchanged record to the historical, then saving the changes to the original model?

Answer 1

If you data is very critical to keep all the data changes I would stick with the triggers. Because as database doing the updates so there is no possible clock skew in the cluster running the web app and if a non-JPA client accesses the database then you could keep updates as well.

However, if you are not so obsesive about these kind of concerns than I would suggest you magic EntityListeners such as:

• @PrePersist
• @PreUpdate
• @PreRemove
• @PostPersist
• @PostUpdate
• @PostRemove

Here you could find examples of how to use EntityListener,