Track Changes to Purchase Order

Card

As any user I want to track changes to a purchase order so that an audit trail exists

This user story is implemented under this issue.

Related User Stories:

• Edit Purchase Order
• Display Audit Records

Conversation

When a submitted or approved purchase order (or any associated item) is changed or deleted, a Note record containing the date and time of the change, the column name and its original and new contents is written to the notes table. Separate records are written for changes to Order and Item records. Note records are linked to their associated order by the notes.order_id column. This will result in orphan Note records if orders are physically deleted, so a search mechanism that does not rely on the Order being present will be required.

Changes are not tracked until the order status is first changed to submitted.

Questions

1. Should we physically delete purchase orders or just flag them as logically deleted (e.g. set status to X)? See discussion under Delete Purchase Order.
2. If the purchase order is set back to Draft by the Approver, do subsequent changes by the Creator to the Draft need to be tracked? I would like to be able to follow all changes and notes from Creation to Processing. The primary need is to track changes following approval. It is not such a high priority to track changes made prior to approval however this would be ideal if possible. My suggestion in one of the other notes is that any changes are added to the audit trail and any internal notes are also added to the audit trail and that this list is displayed at the bottom of each purchase order. I picture this being a list that is automatically added to when an approver or processor makes a change and has a text box for anyone to add a note to the audit trail in the footer of each purchase order screen like Github has a space to Write a small message explaining this change.

Confirmation

Replace this text with descriptions of workflows for testing