Introduction

Wikipedia: "An audit trail (also called audit log) is a security-relevant chronological record, set of records, and/or destination and source of records that provide documentary evidence of the sequence of activities that have affected at any time a specific operation, procedure, or event".

ASP.NET Boilerplate provides an infrastructure to automatically log all interactions with the application. It can record intended method calls with caller info and arguments.

Basically, saved fields are: Related tenant id, caller user id, called service name (the class of the called method), called method name, execution parameters (serialized into JSON), execution time, execution duration (as milliseconds), client IP address, client's computer name and the exception (if method throws an exception).

Wtih these informations, we not just know who did the operation, also can measure performance of the application and observe exceptions thrown. Even more, you can get statistics about usage of your application.

Auditing system uses IAbpSession to get current UserId and TenantId.

Application service, MVC Controller, Web API and ASP.NET Core methods are automatically audited by default.

Configuration

To configure auditing, you can use Configuration.Auditing property in your module's PreInitialize method. Auditing is enabled by default. You can disable it as shown below.

public class MyModule : AbpModule
{
    public override void PreInitialize()
    {
        Configuration.Auditing.IsEnabled = false;
    }

    //...
}

Here, a list of auditing configuration properties:

• IsEnabled: Used to enable/disable auditing system completely. Default: true.
• IsEnabledForAnonymousUsers: If this is set to true, audit logs are saved also for users those are not logged in to the system. Default: false.
• Selectors: Used to select other classes to save audit logs.

Selectors is a list of predicates to select other types to save audit logs. A selector has a unique name and a predicate. The only default selector in this list is used to select application service classes. It's defined as shown below:

Configuration.Auditing.Selectors.Add(
    new NamedTypeSelector(
        "Abp.ApplicationServices",
        type => typeof (IApplicationService).IsAssignableFrom(type)
    )
);

You can add your selectors in your module's PreInitialize method. Also, you can remove the selector above by name if you don't like to save audit logs for application services. That's why it has a unique name (Use simple LINQ to find the selector in Selectors and remove it if you want).

Note: In addition to standard audit configuration, MVC and ASP.NET Core modules define configuration to enable/disable audit logging for actions.

Enable/Disable by attributes

While you can select auditing classes by configuration, you can use Audited and DisableAuditing attributes for a single class, a single method. An example:

[Audited]
public class MyClass
{
    public void MyMethod1(int a)
    {
        //...
    }

    [DisableAuditing]
    public void MyMethod2(string b)
    {
        //...
    }

    public void MyMethod3(int a, int b)
    {
        //...
    }
}

All methods of MyClass are audited except MyMethod2 since it's explicitly disabled. Audited attribute can be used for a method to just save audits for the desired method.

DisableAuditing can also be used for or a single property of a DTO. Thus, you can hide sensitive data in audit logs, such as passwords for example.

Notes

• A method must be public in order to saving audit logs. Private and protected methods are ignored.
• A method must be virtual if it's called over class reference. This is not needed if it's injected using it's interface (like injecting IPersonService interface to use PersonService class). This is needed since ASP.NET Boilerplate uses dynamic proxying and interception. This is not true for MVC Controller actions. They may not be virtual.