Sequelize Paper Trail

---

Help wanted: Please try out [email protected] and give a 👍/👎 here if it works as expected.

---

Track changes to your models, for auditing or versioning. See how a model looked at any stage in its lifecycle, revert it to any version, or restore it after it has been destroyed. Record the user who created the version.

Table of Contents

• Sequelize Paper Trail
  • Table of Contents
  • Installation
  • Usage
    • Example
  • User Tracking
  • Options
    • Default options
    • Options documentation
  • Limitations
  • Testing
  • Support
  • Contributing
  • Author
  • Thanks
  • Links

Installation

npm install --save sequelize-paper-trail
# or with yarn:
# yarn add sequelize-paper-trail

Note: the current test suite is very limited in coverage.

Usage

Sequelize Paper Trail assumes that you already set up your Sequelize connection, for example, like this:

const Sequelize = require('sequelize');
const sequelize = new Sequelize('database', 'username', 'password');

then adding Sequelize Paper Trail is as easy as:

const PaperTrail = require('sequelize-paper-trail').init(sequelize, options);
PaperTrail.defineModels();

which loads the Paper Trail library, and the defineModels() method sets up a Revisions and RevisionHistory table.

Note: If you pass userModel option to init in order to enable user tracking, userModel should be setup before defineModels() is called.

Then for each model that you want to keep a paper trail you simply add:

Model.hasPaperTrail();

hasPaperTrail returns the hasMany association to the revisionModel so you can keep track of the association for reference later.

Example

const Sequelize = require('sequelize');
const sequelize = new Sequelize('database', 'username', 'password');

const PaperTrail = require('sequelize-paper-trail').init(sequelize, options || {});
PaperTrail.defineModels();

const User = sequelize.define('User', {
  username: Sequelize.STRING,
  birthday: Sequelize.DATE
});

User.Revisions = User.hasPaperTrail();

User Tracking

There are 2 steps to enable user tracking, ie, recording the user who created a particular revision.

1. Enable user tracking by passing userModel option to init, with the name of the model which stores users in your application as the value.

const options = {
  /* ... */
  userModel: 'user',
};

2. Pass the id of the user who is responsible for the database operation to sequelize-paper-trail either by sequelize options or by using continuation-local-storage.

Model.update({
  /* ... */
}, {
  userId: user.id
}).then(() {
  /* ... */
});

OR

const createNamespace = require('continuation-local-storage').createNamespace;
const session = createNamespace('my session');

session.set('userId', user.id);

Model.update({
  /* ... */
}).then(() {
  /* ... */
});

To enable continuation-local-storage set continuationNamespace in initialization options. Additionally, you may also have to call .run() or .bind() on your cls namespace, as described in the docs.

Disable logging for a single call

To not log a specific change to a revisioned object, just pass a noPaperTrail with a truthy (true, 1, ' ') value.

const instance = await Model.findOne();
instance.update({ noPaperTrail: true }).then(() {
  /* ... */
});

Options

Paper Trail supports various options that can be passed into the initialization. The following are the default options:

Default options

// Default options
const options = {
  exclude: [
    'id',
    'createdAt',
    'updatedAt',
    'deletedAt',
    'created_at',
    'updated_at',
    'deleted_at'
  ],
  revisionAttribute: 'revision',
  revisionModel: 'Revision',
  revisionChangeModel: 'RevisionChange',
  enableRevisionChangeModel: false,
  UUID: false,
  underscored: false,
  underscoredAttributes: false,
  defaultAttributes: {
    documentId: 'documentId',
    revisionId: 'revisionId'
  },
  enableCompression: false,
  enableMigration: false,
  enableStrictDiff: true,
  continuationKey: 'userId',
  belongsToUserOptions: undefined,
  metaDataFields: undefined,
  metaDataContinuationKey: 'metaData'
};

Options documentation

Option	Type	Default Value	Description
[debug]	Boolean	false	Enables logging to the console.
[exclude]	Array	['id', 'createdAt', 'updatedAt', 'deletedAt', 'created_at', 'updated_at', 'deleted_at', [options.revisionAttribute]]	Array of global attributes to exclude from the paper trail.
[revisionAttribute]	String	'revision'	Name of the attribute in the table that corresponds to the current revision.
[revisionModel]	String	'Revision'	Name of the model that keeps the revision models.
[tableName]	String	undefined	Name of the table that keeps the revision models. Passed to Sequelize. Necessary in Sequelize 5+ when underscored is true and the table is camelCase or PascalCase.
[revisionChangeModel]	String	'RevisionChange'	Name of the model that tracks all the attributes that have changed during each create and update call.
[enableRevisionChangeModel]	Boolean	false	Disable the revision change model to save space.
[UUID]	Boolean	false	The [revisionModel] has id attribute of type UUID for postgresql.
[underscored]	Boolean	false	The [revisionModel] and [revisionChangeModel] have 'createdAt' and 'updatedAt' attributes, by default, setting this option to true changes it to 'created_at' and 'updated_at'.
[underscoredAttributes]	Boolean	false	The [revisionModel] has a [defaultAttribute] 'documentId', and the [revisionChangeModel] has a [defaultAttribute] 'revisionId, by default, setting this option to true changes it to 'document_id' and 'revision_id'.
[defaultAttributes]	Object	{ documentId: 'documentId', revisionId: 'revisionId' }
[userModel]	String		Name of the model that stores users in your.
[enableCompression]	Boolean	false	Compresses the revision attribute in the [revisionModel] to only the diff instead of all model attributes.
[enableMigration]	Boolean	false	Automatically adds the [revisionAttribute] via a migration to the models that have paper trails enabled.
[enableStrictDiff]	Boolean	true	Reports integers and strings as different, e.g. 3.14 !== '3.14'
[continuationNamespace]	String		Name of the name space used with the continuation-local-storage module.
[continuationKey]	String	'userId'	The continuation-local-storage key that contains the user id.
[belongsToUserOptions]	Object	undefined	The options used for belongsTo between userModel and Revision model
[metaDataFields]	Object	undefined	The keys that will be provided in the meta data object. { key: isRequired (boolean)} format. Can be used to privovide additional fields - other associations, dates, etc to the Revision model
[metaDataContinuationKey]	String	'metaData'	The continuation-local-storage key that contains the meta data object, from where the metaDataFields are extracted.

Limitations

• This project does not support models with composite primary keys. You can work around using a unique index with multiple fields.

Testing

The tests are designed to run on SQLite3 in-memory tables, built from Sequelize migration files. If you want to actually generate a database file, change the storage option to a filename and run the tests.

npm test
# or with yarn:
# yarn test

Support

Please use:

• GitHub's issue tracker

Contributing

1. Fork it
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Added some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create new Pull Request

Author

© Niels van Galen Last – @nielsgl – [email protected] Distributed under the MIT license. See LICENSE for more information. https://github.com/nielsgl/sequelize-paper-trail

Thanks

This project was inspired by:

• Sequelize-Revisions
• Paper Trail

Contributors: https://github.com/nielsgl/sequelize-paper-trail/graphs/contributors

Links

• Example application