Using Audit Trails

You've just finished lunch and are ready to get back to work. You have a site in Liferay you use to manage your project, and before you left, you were about to create a folder in your Documents and Media library for sharing some requirements documentation. Sitting down at your desk, you navigate to the repository and attempt to create the folder.

You do not have permission to perform this action, Liferay helpfully tells you.

"What?", you blurt accidentally in surprise. "This is my project!"

"Ah, you too?" asks a co-worker helpfully from over the cube wall. "I lost access to a wiki I was updating just a few minutes ago. I was about to enter a support ticket for it."

"Forget the ticket. Let's go see the portal admin now," you say.

And off you go, two floors down, to the far end of the building where, as you approach, you can already hear stress in the portal admin's voice as he tries to reassure someone on the phone.

"Yes, Mr. Jones. Yes, I'll fix it." (Jones? The president of the company? goes through your mind.) "I'll get on it right away, Mr. Jones. It was just a mistake; I'll fix it. Thank you, Mr. Jones," and he hangs up the phone.

"Problems?" you ask the portal admin, whose name is Harry. He does look rather harried.

"Yeah, Tom," he says. "Somebody changed a bunch of permissions in the portal--it wasn't me. I'm assuming you and Dick are here because of the same problem?"

"Yup," you say. "I lost access to a document repository folder."

"And I lost access to a wiki," Dick says helpfully.

"It was probably due to some site membership change. Let's take a look at the audit portlet in the control panel and see what happened."

When in the course of human events it becomes necessary to see what users are doing on your portal, you'll find that Liferay makes this easy. If you're a Liferay Enterprise Edition customer, you have access to two plugins--a hook and a portlet--that, in combination with some settings in portal-ext.properties, enable you to see all the activity that occurs in your portal. Using this, you can quickly find out what changes were made, and by whom. If you've delegated permission granting to any group of people, this is an essential feature you're likely to use.

We'll come back to Tom, Dick, and Harry's story later in the chapter. For now, let's look at how to install Liferay's audit plugins so you can do the same thing Harry's about to do.