[LRUG] Today's monthly meeting and paper_trail

[Andrew Stewart]

On 12 Aug 2013, at 18:50, James McCarthy <james2mccarthy at gmail.com> wrote:
> I've used PaperTrail in the past. It's very easy to get going. It does what it says on the tin and pretty well. Ryan Bates has a Railscast  and ASCIIcast for it.  My only reservation is that it very much a swiss army knife and I personally lean towards more minimal tools where possible.

You can configure paper_trail to record only the events (create/update/destroy) and attributes you're interested in, so in that sense you can minimise its footprint easily.

> I would be inclined to first ask yourself what your goal is. If you just need to produce an audit trail you may not need all the versioning and ability to undo etc. I would think about performance and database load if you are building something that will have a heavy load or is it going to be more of a boutique app where you can think about performance later. 

Personally I haven't had the occasion to use paper_trail at scale / under load.  However by design it's easy to archive or remove old versions; and you can use a table per versioned model, if you want, to help keep things manageable.

Finally it's worth mentioning that paper_trail is still actively developed – thanks to @fullbridge-batkins – so if you run into a problem you'll receive prompt support.

Cheers,
Andy Stewart (original author of paper_trail)