django-model-tracker

Track model object changes over time so that you know who done what.

Installation

• Install the package

  • For Django<4.0

     pip install 'django-model-tracker jsonfield'

  • For Django>=4.0

     pip install 'django-model-tracker'

• Add Application to your project's INSTALLED_APPs

INSTALLED_APPS = (
     '....',
    'ModelTracker',
    )

• Add the following line to your urls.py

import ModelTracker
urlpatterns = patterns('',
...
url(r'^track/', include('ModelTracker.urls')),
...
)

• Run Migrations

   python manage.py migrate ModelTracker 

• Add the following line to your models.py file

from ModelTracker import Tracker

• Convert each Model you want to track to inhert from Tracker.ModelTracker instead of models.Model

Old Code

   class Employee(models.Model):
     name=models.CharField(max_length=255)
     address=models.CharField(max_length=255)
     age=models.IntegerField()

New Code

 class Employee(Tracker.ModelTracker):
   name=models.CharField(max_length=255)
   address=models.CharField(max_length=255)
   age=models.IntegerField()

• For each save() call, add the user the username
  • Old Code

   emp=Employee()
   emp.save()

 * New Code

       emp=Employee()
       emp.save(request.user.username)

• Starting from version of 0.5, you can pass a event_name parameter to mark change as an event

  • New Code

       emp=Employee()
       emp.save(request.user.username,event_name="Created the user")

Using The Middleware

You can add ModelTracker.middleware.ModelTrackerMiddleware to your Middleware classes to get the username automatically from the request.

MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES = (
     '....',
    'ModelTracker.middleware.ModelTrackerMiddleware',
    )

Note: If you pass username as None then the change won't be saved.

Showing Record History

There are 3 ways to see the history of a record

1. go to ModelTracker url and select Table and enter id.
2. call showModelChanges by POST and send csrftokenmiddleware to return history as html.
3. call getModelChanges which returns history as Json.

Django Admin

There is 2 ways to update an object by django admin

1. Handle save and delete in ModelAdmin as follows

   def save_model(self, request, obj, form, change):
        obj.save(request.user.username,"Editing From admin interface")
   
   def delete_model(self, request, obj):
        obj.delete(username=request.user.username, event_name="Deleting From admin interface")

2. Inhert from TrackerAdmin rather ModelAdmin

   from ModelTracker.Tracker import TrackerAdmin 
   admin.site.register(employee, TrackerAdmin)