Issue with envers tracking more changes than occur

[stevemac]

I have been recently working on using Envers to produce a highly detailed audit trail of all changes in our system.

We have been tracking changes per entity using Envers since the inception of the project, but are now just at a stage where we need to actually retreive the next level of detail from our Audit logs.

Now that I can actually look at the data being tracked, I have noticed that Envers is tracking versions of things that haven't changed.

My example is:

A Journal has multiple Items, each of those items have a Location, and Account and an Amount.

Location and Account are actually other entities in the system, while the Amount is just a BigDecimal on the Item Entity.

When I create a new Journal, envers records an ADD for Journal, and 2 ADD's for the Item's, but it also records and UPDATE for the 2 Accounts from each line.

Debugging the hibernate SQL there is NO update command issued for the Account (nor should there be).

When I chech the Account_AUD table I see 2 entries for each Account, the initial insert (prior to the Journal creation) and an update revision, but there are NO field differences between the 2 records.

What I find wierd is that, from my perspective, Account and Location should look the same to Envers..  If 1 was going to be versioned why didn't the other one?

What I really want is ONLY the 3 items that have actually been added to be tracked by Envers..

Is this a known issue?  or any pointers to where I should look to try and resolve this issue?

Cheers,

Steve

[stevemac]

As usual, take the time to write up the issue and then keep hunting and you'll eventually find the issue.

It seems there was a subtle difference between Account and Location, the Location didn't have a reverse mapping for a list of all Items, where as the Account did.

    @OneToMany(cascade = CascadeType.ALL, fetch = FetchType.LAZY, mappedBy = "account")

    private List<JournalItem> journalItems = new ArrayList<JournalItem>(0);

This mapping is not actually used in our system, so I was able to remove it and when I did so EnVers stopped tracking the Account as changed when the Journal's were added.

Hopefully this might help others stumbling on the same issue.