All categories
Track Changes
Problem
It is difficult to understand how a record came to be in its current or previous state.
Context
Changes have been made to a record or set of records, which another contributor or user would like to understand.
Solution
Create and display a log of Changesets, where each entry represents an amendment to a record.
Records may evolve through multiple amendments from different contributors. Amendments can include:
- Creation of a new record
- Additions of new data to an existing record
- Removal of data from an existing record
- Deletion of a record
- Reverts: undoing a previous change
Knowing the history of changes to a record is useful in a number of circumstances, for example:
- To inform decisions about its future
- To understand activity in a record, perhaps to resolve disputes
- To assess the implications of accepting or reverting a specific change
- To find out about the evolution of a record, or a set of records, including the whole database
- To analyse patterns of behaviour, from either a record or database level
By keeping a log of changes and associating them with records, the history of a record and a project can be displayed, for moderators and contributors to view.
Related patterns
Changeset
Multiple collaborators independently making entries into a database makes it difficult to understand how the dataset reached its current state.