How to create an undo function in spring MVC based web app.? - java

I have an employee and a corresponding employee history table.
Both the tables have same structure. History table is used to track the historical changes made to the employee over a period of time.
Now, I need to add an undo function to the changes made to the employee.
e.g. Employees title is changed on 1st August. Now, This will update the employees title in Employee table and insert an corresponding history record in employee_history table.
Now, I need to undo this change. Employee edit page will have a list of changes made to employee datewise with an undo button beside it.
Clicking on undo should revert changes in Employee table to previous value. Also I think the record in history table which says title is changed, should also be removed.
Also when I revert tghe changes to employee table i.e. revert title to previous title, this will fire an insert to history table, which I dont want.
I am not sure what is the best possible way to do this.
Any suggestions will be helpful.

In case you want to implement a "persistent" undo - one that would survive an application restart/session timeout, you should consider extending your DB schema width timestamp fields and either delete the last entry or replace it with an appropriate earlier entry.
A "light" version would be using a stack to store last interactions, including the original and the new value. You could persist the stack on session invalidation of course to combine both approaches. This seems to be what you are actually doing.
You could extend this solution by creating and storing or exporting SQL migration scripts for each change, recording the change and, if possible, the opposite action. So you could even transfer the scripts between application instances and environments and would have a complete "replayability" of your DB states.
tl;dr - it looks like you have already implemented a good solution

I would suggest using a flag telling the trigger/history logic to keep off while you have your undo running and not writing history data.
Normally this would be done by serializer-class feeding from your history table and restoring employee data and later cleaning up history-entries/unlocking history again.

You could maybe use the rollback feature of the transaction.

Related

How to edit(add) something already saved in a database table column?

I'm using java and I have a software that registers a patient and save it in a database, but there are some attributes that must be changed every time and I dont know how to do it:
My table(patients):
1.Name: (patient's name) [varchar].
2.CPF:(is a personal number that Brazilians uses to identify yourself, everybody has one), [varchar].
3.Notes:(patient's progress after the scessions) the patient will receive a bunch of notes, so it should be an array.
After one note saved, I would like to save more after...
As after the update, you Need to update the notes for the patient. So what you can do is create a table called Patient_Notes where it will have the reference from the patient table (patient_id). By this, you can store all the notes for the patient. And also you won't need to update the same. You can just fetch the last one and also you will the have the records for all the notes that have been made.

Audit Using Hibernate Envers

I am using hibernate envers for making history of my data, it's working fine as well. The problem here is, it's creating duplicate data in history table i.e. creating data in history table whether there is any change in audited table or not. I want only changed fields stored in my history table. I am new to hibernate envers. What can I do?
If I understand your question correctly, Envers doesn't work that way, at least not out of the box.
Envers is a commit-snapshot auditing solution where just before commit, it examines audited entity state and determines whether any attributes have been modified or not and records a snapshot of all audited fields of that entity at that point in time. This means that the only time an audit entry isn't created is when no attributes have been modified.
But it also uses the snapshot approach because it fits really well with the Query API.
Consider the inefficiency that would occur if a query to find an entity at a given revision had to read all rows from that revision back to the beginning of time, iterating each row and merging the column state captured to just instantiate a single row result-set.
With the snapshot approach, it boils down to the following query, no loops or iterative work.
SELECT e FROM AuditedEntity e WHERE e.revisionNumber = :revisionNumber
This is far more efficient from a I/O perspective both with the database reading the data pages and the network for streaming a single row result-set rather than multi-row result-set to the client.
I'd say in this case, the saying "space is cheap" really holds true when you compare that against the cost and inefficiencies your application would face doing it any other way.
If this is something you'd like Envers to support, perhaps via some user configured strategy then you're welcomed to log a new feature request in JIRA for hibernate-envers and I can take a look at its feasibility.
I had similar problem.
In my case the error was that audited field had higher precision than the database field. Please see my reply to another thread: https://stackoverflow.com/a/65844949/13381019

Possible overwriting to database table

Let's say you have a database table name table1 with columns name and surname. Two different clients open the same view from the java application and get the data for same person at the same time.
1) First client changed the name and pressed save button to update database record.
2) Client2 still sees the old record on the screen and then pressed to save button to change the surname.
It actually overwrite the record by old name. I think to check and get the latest data before updating the database when I click button but I do not like this solution because of making a second query before update.
So how can we solve this problem by using Hibernate and without using Hibarnete. Any idea?
Of course if you do not want that something will be overridden, then you have to check the data before an update. But it will be not always a real query with a good caching strategy. You could also use a timestamp with last update to compare it easier. Another strategy would be to lock the entities when the first user will read them. But that is normally not a good design for web applications or you have to integrate a messaging service, which will all user inform for an update who actually have open that entity. But I think that is not so easy to implement and a more advanced feature.
In short, compare the timestamp of an entity and if already updated, then compare the changes and show them for the user who wanted update that entity.

How to Iterate across records in a MySql Database using Java

I have a customer with a very small set of data and records that I'd normally just serialize to a data file and be done but they want to run extra reports and have expandability down the road to do things their own way. The MySQL database came up and so I'm adapting their Java POS (point of sale) system to work with it.
I've done this before and here was my approach in a nutshell for one of the tables, say Customers:
I setup a loop to store the primary key into an arraylist then setup a form to go from one record to the next running SQL queries based on the PK. The query would pull down the fname, lname, address, etc. and fill in the fields on the screen.
I thought it might be a little clunky running a SQL query each time they click Next. So I'm looking for another approach to this problem. Any help is appreciated! I don't need exact code or anything, just some concepts will do fine
Thanks!
I would say the solution you suggest yourself is not very good not only because you run SQL query every time a button is pressed, but also because you are iterating over primary keys, which probably are not sorted in any meaningful order...
What you want is to retrieve a certain number of records which are sorted sensibly (by first/last name or something) and keep them as a kind of cache in your ArrayList or something similar... This can be done quite easily with SQL. When the user starts iterating over the results by pressing "Next", you can in the background start loading more records.
The key to keep usability is to load some records before the user actually request them to keep latency small, but keeping in mind that you also don't want to load the whole database at once....
Take a look at indexing your database. http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=377652
Use JPA with the built in Hibernate provider. If you are not familiar with one or both, then download NetBeans - it includes a very easy to follow tutorial you can use to get up to speed. Managing lists of objects is trivial with the new JPA and you won't find yourself reinventing the wheel.
the key concept here is pagination.
Let's say you set your page size to 10. This means you select 10 records from the database, in a certain order, so your query should have an order by clause and a limit clause at the end. You use this resultset to display the form while the users navigates with Previous/Next buttons.
When the user navigates out of the page then you fetch an other page.
https://www.google.com/search?q=java+sql+pagination

keeping the history of table in java

I need the sample program in Java for keeping the history of table if user inserted, updated and deleted on that table. Can anybody help in this?
Thanks in advance.
If you are working with Hibernate you can use Envers to solve this problem.
You have two options for this:
Let the database handle this automatically using triggers. I don't know what database you're using but all of them support triggers that you can use for this.
Write code in your program that does something similar when inserting, updating and deleting a user.
Personally, I prefer the first option. It probably requires less maintenance. There may be multiple places where you update a user, all those places need the code to update the other table. Besides, in the database you have more options for specifying required values and integrity constraints.
Well, we normally have our own history tables which (mostly) look like the original table. Since most of our tables already have the creation date, modification date and the respective users, all we need to do is copy the dataset from the live table to the history table with a creation date of now().
We're using Hibernate so this could be done in an interceptor, but there may be other options as well, e.g. some database trigger executing a script, etc.
How is this a Java question?
This should be moved in Database section.
You need to create a history table. Then create database triggers on the original table for "create or replace trigger before insert or update or delete on table for each row ...."
I think this can be achieved by creating a trigger in the sql-server.
you can create the TRIGGER as follows:
Syntax:
CREATE TRIGGER trigger_name
{BEFORE | AFTER } {INSERT | UPDATE |
DELETE } ON table_name FOR EACH ROW
triggered_statement
you'll have to create 2 triggers one for before the operation is performed and another after the operation is performed.
otherwise it can be achieved through code also but it would be a bit tedious for the code to handle in case of batch processes.
You should try using triggers. You can have a separate table (exact replica of your table of which you need to maintain history) .
This table will then be updated by trigger after every insert/update/delete on your main table.
Then you can write your java code to get these changes from the second history table.
I think you can use the redo log of your underlying database to keep track of the operation performed. Is there any particular reason to go for the program?
You could try creating say a List of the objects from the table (Assuming you have objects for the data). Which will allow you to loop through the list and compare to the current data in the table? You will then be able to see if any changes occurred.
You can even create another list with a object that contains an enumerator that gives you the action (DELETE, UPDATE, CREATE) along with the new data.
Haven't done this before, just a idea.
Like #Ashish mentioned, triggers can be used to insert into a seperate table - this is commonly referred as Audit-Trail table or audit log table.
Below are columns generally defined in such audit trail table : 'Action' (insert,update,delete) , tablename (table into which it was inserted/deleted/updated), key (primary key of that table on need basis) , timestamp (the time at which this action was done)
It is better to audit-log after the entire transaction is through. If not, in case of exception being passed back to code-side, seperate call to update audit tables will be needed. Hope this helps.
If you are talking about db tables you may use either triggers in db or add some extra code within your application - probably using aspects. If you are using JPA you may use entity listeners or perform some extra logic adding some aspect to your DAO object and apply specific aspect to all DAOs which perform CRUD on entities that needs to sustain historical data. If your DAO object is stateless bean you may use Interceptor to achive that in other case use java proxy functionality, cglib or other lib that may provide aspect functionality for you. If you are using Spring instead of EJB you may advise your DAOs within application context config file.
Triggers are not suggestable, when I stored my audit data in file else I didn't use the database...my suggestion is create table "AUDIT" and write java code with help of servlets and store the data in file or DB or another DB also ...

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