Auditing

Automatic timestamp fields

Many tables need technical metadata: when a record was created and when it was last changed. Filling these fields manually in every service is inconvenient and easy to forget. Spring Data supports auditing — infrastructure that can set these values when an entity is saved.

@Configuration
@EnableJdbcAuditing
class PersistenceConfig {
}

@Table("customers")
class Customer {
    @Id
    Long id;

    String name;

    @CreatedDate
    Instant createdAt;

    @LastModifiedDate
    Instant updatedAt;
}

@EnableJdbcAuditing enables auditing support for Spring Data JDBC. @CreatedDate marks the creation-time field, and @LastModifiedDate marks the last-modification field. When an entity is saved through Spring Data infrastructure, these values are populated by the corresponding callbacks.

Auditing does not replace business data

The technical modification time of a record and, for example, the time when an order was confirmed are different things. Auditing is a good fit for technical persistence history, while domain events are better modeled with separate fields that change according to business rules.