Some time ago we began to record all changes of our EJB3 entities with the help of Envers framework.
And now the question is - what GUI can we suggest to users to view this history.
The main requirements are:
- rather easy to implement (cause viewing history is not a service with very high priority)
- easy for users enough that they will not call to programmer to interpret what they see on the screen.
Let's say we have entity Person and entity Phone, associated with Person by one-to-many relationship. In Person we have the method List getPhones() . In our system we mostly work with entity Person. So it's preferably that in GUI users could find history by person, not by concrete phone.
In current version of Envers we can't traverse relations when selecting entities at a given revision. So it will be rather hard to create "full" revision of entities (like Person including phones), guessing that we have many different entity classes with different mappings.
So, another variant is working with such composite entity like with set of tables. For example we can show the form with tabs, on each tab we have the history of one table (for example Person and Phone) and give users an opportunity to locate the concrete revision at each tab.
How do you show your history in GUI? Are there some common ways for that?