Tracking Delta-Only Data Audits In ColdFusion Using XML

(Ben Nadel) The other day, I explored the idea of an audit table that copies the entire record in question, creating a full-record snap-shot in time. In the comments to that post, there was some great discussion as to how to create audits and why we might want to do it a certain way. As we mostly agreed on, the type of auditing you do is highly dependent on the business strategy and what the audit is being used for. In an application that I am working on right now, the audit data is being used as a page element on many high level, administrative pages for quality control. As such, it was very important for a staff member to be able to pop in and see exactly what was changed and who changed it. Because of this, I found that I needed the audit trail to be very accessible from a human-readable stand point; to aide this effort, I tracked audits using XML strings, recording ONLY what changed from form action to form action.

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