ActiveRecord Where Assoc VS PaperTrail

I’ve been using the activerecord_where_assoc gem for this. I think it’s API is more natural than this proposal.

Your examples using joins would return duplicated Sections. That might force you to add a distinct. I personally find it wrong to do a distinct in a scope just to be able to make the condition I want the scope to do. It's a hidden side effect that could cause problem elsewhere and it's unexpected from the name of the scope. I made a gem to deal with that situation: where_assoc. There is definitely an overlap between both gem.

Assuming that ... was indicating some form of annoyance with that distinct, you might want to take a look at activerecord_where_assoc

Here are more examples.

Here is an introduction to the gem.

I highly recommend looking at my gem : activerecord_where_assoc

There are multiple ways to filter by an associatin in Rails and they all have problems.

Start with https://github.com/paper-trail-gem/paper_trail

I think you could use that in conjunction with the paper_trail gem, as /u/GreenCalligrapher571 mentioned, which is also a good suggestion. As an additional note, when changing records in production while using the paper_trail gem, I suggest wrapping your database-mutating statements executed in the rails console within a whodunnit block, so PaperTrail.request(whodunnit: 'Dorian Marié') { widget.update name: 'Wibble' } or something rather than just widget.update name: 'Wibble'. Or, if you have some sort of issue-tracking / ticketing system, you could set the whodunnit value to the ticket number or whatever, and then anyone who wants to know why the records are in the state they're in can consult that ticket, which hopefully has additional relevant context.

In most designs, this would probably not be possible unless a table tracking extension is being used in an ORM. Even with change tracking enabled through extensions like paper trail or Django simple history, it can be tricky to restore deleted entities. Object tracking would need to have been enabled before it is needed to ensure the data is still around to be restored.

Maybe you are looking for the papertrail gem? https://github.com/paper-trail-gem/paper_trail

has_paper_trail is from the paper-trail-gem, do you have that installed?

If talking about console access on production: First this is pretty limited. Then, we have logic in place, that sets the public key, the person authenticated with to access the console as the whodunnit ID in paper-trail, so that at least all their changes are audited. The thing @bluehavana posted, with auditing everything that was entered in the console is a good idea as well.