Implementation of an audit strategy with C# and Audit.NET
How to implement an efficient audit system with C# and Entity Framework Core?
Structure of the audit tables
I have talked about Entity Framework in my previous posts:
- Creating A Model For An Existing Database
- Entity Framework Core And Calling A Stored Procedure
- Transactions With Entity Framework Core
- Database Connection Resiliency In Entity Framework Core
- Database Connection Resiliency In Entity Framework Core: Update
Often, during my implementation, there is a common request: track all changes in the database and where and who is changing a record.
A way to implement an audit is to override the SubmitChanges function in your data context. I created a post about it a long time ago; it was 2014. The post has title Log record changes in SQL server in an audit table and I was using Entity Framework.
So, I googled a bit and I found a very nice NuGet package that can help us to implement what we need. Audit.NET is the package and it is pretty complete. Although the documentation is good, I was struggle to understand how to use it in my project. For this reason, I want to give you all my thoughts and the final solution. So, you can use it.
For the full explanation of this code, read Audit with Entity Framework Core
API samples
| Description | Command |
|---|---|
| Get all records | curl -X GET http://localhost:50732/api/values -H "content-type: application/json" |
| Get record | curl -X GET http://localhost:50732/api/values/1 -H "content-type: application/json" |
| Insert record | curl -X POST http://localhost:50732/api/values -H "content-type: application/json" -d '"Some description"' |
| Update record | curl -X PUT http://localhost:50732/api/values/1 -H "content-type: application/json" -d '"New description"' |
| Delete record | curl -X DELETE http://localhost:50732/api/values/1 -H "content-type: application/json" |
| Delete multiple records | curl -X DELETE http://localhost:50732/api/values/delete -H "content-type: application/json" -d '"2,3,4"' |
| Get all records | curl -X GET http://localhost:50732/api/contacts -H "content-type: application/json" |
| Get record | curl -X GET http://localhost:50732/api/contacts/1 -H "content-type: application/json" |
| Insert record | curl -X POST http://localhost:50732/api/contacts -H "content-type: application/json" -d '"Some description"' |
| Update record | curl -X PUT http://localhost:50732/api/contacts/1 -H "content-type: application/json" -d '"New description"' |
| Delete record | curl -X DELETE http://localhost:50732/api/contacts/1 -H "content-type: application/json" |
| Delete multiple records | curl -X DELETE http://localhost:50732/api/contacts/delete -H "content-type: application/json" -d '"2,3,4"' |
If you have any question, please use my forum and visit my blog.