Setting up the Record history reporting functionality

As an optional paid-for option, a new Record history reports function is available for Collections 1.17 and up. It will offer a new dialog/result window allowing the user to search any selection of data sources and by modification date range, for changes in records, displaying the old and new value per field. The user can filter and sort the resulting set of changes on data source, record number, field tag, edit date, time, user name, occurrence, data language and new or old value. Then the user can export the resulting overview to a CSV file which can of course be opened in Microsoft Excel for futher processing and checking. Once set up, users with the $ADMIN role will see a new Record history reports option underneath the Maintenance menu in Collections. Please see the Collections 1.17 release notes for more information about the user-interface side of this functionality.

Set up requires two or three steps:

•Saved changes in fields (when an empty field has been filled, an filled-in field has gotten a different value or when a filled-in field has been emptied) will only be logged in the database from the moment the Journal field changes option for a database definition has been set to Record history (Collections). Only data sources which are associated with a database definition for which the Journal field changes option has been set, will be listed in the Record history reports window. So make sure this option has been set for all databases for which you'd like to log field modifications.
•An import of data, especially a large one, creates a huge amount of logging data. Retrieving such great amounts of log entries takes a heavy toll on the server and might even take too long and time out. To prevent this from happening the user can limit the number of retrieved entries but you can also improve the performance of fetching the history substantially by having Designer create extra indexes for the journal tables. Do this by right-clicking the \data folder in the Designer Application browser and then select Create missing tables in the pop-up menu. This will add two index tables per journal table in the SQL Server database, called IX_journal_priref and IX_journal_modification. Recommended for really large journal tables.
•A change in the Collection settings.xml file is required as well to enable this functionality.

An IIS application pool recycle is required after making these settings.