Wouldn't it be nice to have a revision history for any model in your project, without having to do any work for it. By simply adding the IsRevisionable Trait to your model, you can instantly have just that, and be able to display a history similar to this:
- Chris changed title from 'Something' to 'Something else'
- Chris changed category from 'News' to 'Breaking news'
- Matt changed category from 'Breaking news' to 'News'
So not only can you see a history of what happened, but who did what, so there's accountability.
Revisionable is a laravel package that allows you to keep a revision history for your models without thinking. For some background and info, see this article
Revisionable is installable via composer, the details are on packagist, here.
Add the following to the require section of your projects composer.json file:
"LocalDynamics/revisionable": "1.*",Run composer update to download the package
php composer.phar update
Open config/app.php and register the required service provider
'providers' => [
LocalDynamics\Revisionable\ServiceProvider::class,
]
Publish the configuration and migrations
php artisan vendor:publish --provider="LocalDynamics\Revisionable\ServiceProvider"
Finally, you'll also need to run migration on the package
php artisan migrate
For any model that you want to keep a revision history for, include the LocalDynamics\Revisionable namespace and use the IsRevisionable in your model, e.g.,
namespace App;
use \LocalDynamics\Revisionable\Concerns\IsRevisionable;
class Article extends \Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model {
use IsRevisionable;
}If needed, you can disable the revisioning by setting $revisionEnabled to false in your Model. This can be handy if you want to temporarily disable revisioning, or if you want to create your own base Model that extends Revisionable, which all of your models extend, but you want to turn Revisionable off for certain models.
namespace App;
use \LocalDynamics\Revisionable\Concerns\IsRevisionable;
class Article extends \Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model {
use IsRevisionable;
protected $revisionEnabled = false;
}You can also disable revisioning after X many revisions have been made by setting $historyLimit to the number of revisions you want to keep before stopping revisions.
namespace App;
use \LocalDynamics\Revisionable\Concerns\IsRevisionable;
class Article extends \Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model {
use IsRevisionable;
protected $revisionEnabled = true;
protected $historyLimit = 500; //Stop tracking revisions after 500 changes have been made.
}In order to maintain a limit on history, but instead of stopping tracking revisions if you want to remove old revisions, you can accommodate that feature by setting $revisionCleanup.
namespace App;
use \LocalDynamics\Revisionable\Concerns\IsRevisionable;
class Article extends \Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model {
use IsRevisionable;
protected $revisionEnabled = true;
protected $revisionCleanup = true; //Remove old revisions (works only when used with $historyLimit)
protected $historyLimit = 500; //Maintain a maximum of 500 changes at any point of time, while cleaning up old revisions.
}By default, if your model supports soft deletes, Revisionable will store this and any restores as updates on the model.
You can choose to ignore deletes and restores by adding deleted_at to your $dontKeepRevisionOf array.
To better format the output for deleted_at entries, you can use the isEmpty formatter (see Format output for an example of this.)
By default the creation of a new model is not stored as a revision. Only subsequent changes to a model is stored.
If you want to store the creation as a revision you can override this behavior by setting revisionCreationsEnabled to true by adding the following to your model:
protected $revisionCreationsEnabled = true;No doubt, there'll be cases where you don't want to store a revision history only for certain fields of the model, this is supported in two different ways. In your model you can either specifiy which fields you explicitly want to track and all other fields are ignored:
protected $keepRevisionOf = ['title'];Or, you can specify which fields you explicitly don't want to track.
All other fields will be tracked.
protected $dontKeepRevisionOf = ['category_id'];The
$keepRevisionOfsetting takes precedence over$dontKeepRevisionOf
Every time a model revision is created an event is fired.
You can listen for revisionable.created, revisionable.saved or revisionable.deleted.
// app/Providers/EventServiceProvider.php
public function boot()
{
parent::boot();
Event::listen('revisionable.*', function($model, $revisions) {
// Do something with the revisions or the changed model.
dd($model, $revisions);
});
}You can continue (and are encouraged to) use
Eloquent accessorsin your model to set the output of your values, see the Laravel Documentation for more information on accessors The below documentation is therefor deprecated
In cases where you want to have control over the format of the output of the values, for example a boolean field, you can set them in the $revisionFormattedFields array in your model. e.g.,
protected $revisionFormattedFields = [
'title' => 'string:<strong>%s</strong>',
'public' => 'boolean:No|Yes',
'modified' => 'datetime:m/d/Y g:i A',
'deleted_at' => 'isEmpty:Active|Deleted'
];You can also override the field name output using the $revisionFormattedFieldNames array in your model, e.g.,
protected $revisionFormattedFieldNames = [
'title' => 'Title',
'small_name' => 'Nickname',
'deleted_at' => 'Deleted At'
];This comes into play when you output the revision field name using $revision->fieldName()
To format a string, simply prefix the value with string: and be sure to include %s (this is where the actual value will appear in the formatted response), e.g.,
string:<strong>%s</strong>
Booleans by default will display as a 0 or a 1, which is pretty bland and won't mean much to the end user, so this formatter can be used to output something a bit nicer. Prefix the value with boolean: and then add your false and true options separated by a pipe, e.g.,
boolean:No|Yes
DateTime by default will display as Y-m-d H:i:s. Prefix the value with datetime: and then add your datetime format, e.g.,
datetime:m/d/Y g:i A
This piggy backs off boolean, but instead of testing for a true or false value, it checks if the value is either null or an empty string.
isEmpty:No|Yes
This can also accept %s if you'd like to output the value, something like the following will display 'Nothing' if the value is empty, or the actual value if something exists:
isEmpty:Nothing|%s
To load the revision history for a given model, simply call the revisionHistory method on that model, e.g.,
$article = Article::find($id);
$history = $article->revisionHistory;For the most part, the revision history will hold enough information to directly output a change history, however in the cases where a foreign key is updated we need to be able to do some mapping and display something nicer than plan_id changed from 3 to 1.
To help with this, there's a few helper methods to display more insightful information, so you can display something like Chris changed plan from bronze to gold.
The above would be the result from this:
@foreach($account->revisionHistory as $history )
<li>{{ $history->userResponsible()->first_name }} changed {{ $history->fieldName() }} from {{ $history->oldValue() }} to {{ $history->newValue() }}</li>
@endforeachIf you have enabled revisions of creations as well you can display it like this:
@foreach($resource->revisionHistory as $history)
@if($history->key == 'created_at' && !$history->old_value)
<li>{{ $history->userResponsible()->first_name }} created this resource at {{ $history->newValue() }}</li>
@else
<li>{{ $history->userResponsible()->first_name }} changed {{ $history->fieldName() }} from {{ $history->oldValue() }} to {{ $history->newValue() }}</li>
@endif
@endforeachReturns the User that was responsible for making the revision. A user model is returned, or null if there was no user recorded.
The user model that is loaded depends on what you have set in your config/auth.php file for the model variable.
Returns the name of the field that was updated, if the field that was updated was a foreign key (at this stage, it simply looks to see if the field has the suffix of _id) then the text before _id is returned. e.g., if the field was plan_id, then plan would be returned.
Remember from above, that you can override the output of a field name with the
$revisionFormattedFieldNamesarray in your model.
This is used when the value (old or new) is the id of a foreign key relationship.
By default, it simply returns the ID of the model that was updated. It is up to you to override this method in your own models to return something meaningful. e.g.,
use LocalDynamics\Revisionable\Concerns\IsRevisionable;
class Article
{
use IsRevisionable; // <- optional
public function identifiableName()
{
return $this->title;
}
}Get the value of the model before or after the update. If it was a foreign key, identifiableName() is called.
In cases where the old or new version of a value is a foreign key that no longer exists, or indeed was null, there are two variables that you can set in your model to control the output in these situations:
protected $revisionNullString = 'nothing';
protected $revisionUnknownString = 'unknown';Sometimes temporarily disabling a revisionable field can come in handy, if you want to be able to save an update however don't need to keep a record of the changes.
$object->disableRevisionField('title'); // Disables titleor:
$object->disableRevisionField(['title', 'content']); // Disables title and content- forked from VentureCraft/revisionable Package