Spring Data JPA Auditing Made Easy with Hibernate Envers
Thorben Janssen - Independent
“Who changed the customer’s name?” “When did they change the shipping address?”
If your application can’t answer these questions, you’re flying blind. Reliable auditing is no longer a nice-to-have. It’s a core requirement for modern business applications. You could implement an audit log manually, but that approach is tedious, error-prone, and likely to leave gaps. Fortunately, there is a better solution. In this session, you will learn how to integrate Hibernate Envers with Spring Data JPA to automatically track every change to your entities. With just one additional annotation, Envers records all modifications and provides a powerful API to query historical data and reconstruct the evolution of your application’s state. We will explore how Envers works, how it fits into the Spring Data JPA stack, and how you can adapt the audit log to your specific business requirements. By the end, you will know how to add reliable, fully automated auditing to your Spring applications without writing unnecessary boilerplate code.
Agenda
You’ll start the workshop by exploring what defines an effective audit log and why it’s a key requirement for modern applications.
Next, you’ll build your first audit log using Hibernate Envers with Spring Data JPA and learn how to adapt it to your needs by:
- Excluding specific fields from auditing
- Handling relationships between audited and non-audited entities
- Adjusting the audit schema
- Extending the revision entity with custom data
Finally, you’ll learn how to query historical data and analyze past states of your application. You’ll use Spring Data’s RevisionRepository to access and display entity revisions and create custom vertical and horizontal queries with the Envers Query API to explore data changes over time and across revisions.
Goals
You’ll learn how to use Hibernate Envers with Spring Data JPA to create an audit log for your application and retrieve historical data based on specific use cases. You’ll also see how to tailor the audit log generated by Hibernate Envers to meet your application’s unique business and technical requirements.
Target audience
Software developers and architects who are already familiar with the general concepts of Spring Data JPA.