Sequelize Revision

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Track revisions of your Sequelize models, revert them to any revision or restore them after being destroyed. Written in TypeScript and can be used with sequelize-typescript.

Sequelize Revision is a fork from Sequelize Paper Trail supporting similar options and providing consistent behavior with following improvements:

• Re-written in TypeScript and support type checks
• Working well with or without sequelize-typescript
• Tracking users for making changes with AsyncLocalStorage
• Support JSON data type for storing revisions
• Exclude revision attributes for each model
• Passing revision metadata to operations
• Logging revisions for upsert operations
• Better coverage in unit tests
• Support composite key

Installation

$ npm install --save sequelize-revision

Usage

Sequelize Revision assumes that you already set up your Sequelize connection, for example, like this:

import { Sequelize } from "sequelize";

const sequelize = new Sequelize("sqlite::memory:");

then adding Sequelize Revision is as easy as:

import { SequelizeRevision } from "sequelize-revision";

const sequelizeRevision = new SequelizeRevision(sequelize, options);
const [Revision, RevisionChanges] = sequelizeRevision.defineModels();

which loads the Sequelize Revision library, and the defineModels() method sets up a Revision and RevisionChange models.

Note: If you pass userModel option to the constructor in order to enable user tracking, userModel should be setup before defineModels() is called.

Then for each model that you want to keep a paper trail you simply add:

sequelizeRevision.trackRevision(Model);

Example

import Sequelize from "sequelize";
import { SequelizeRevision } from "sequelize-revision";

const sequelize = new Sequelize("sqlite::memory:");
const sequelizeRevision = new SequelizeRevision(sequelize, options);
const [Revision, RevisionChanges] = sequelizeRevision.defineModels();

const User = sequelize.define("User", { name: Sequelize.STRING });
sequelizeRevision.trackRevision(User);

Options

Sequelize Revision supports various options that can be passed into the initialization. The following are the default options:

Options documentation

Option	Type	Default Value	Description
[exclude]	Array	["id", "createdAt", "updatedAt", "deletedAt", "created_at", "updated_at", "deleted_at", [options.revisionAttribute]]	Array of global attributes to exclude from the Sequelize Revision.
[revisionAttribute]	String	"revision"	Name of the attribute in the table that corresponds to the current revision.
[revisionIdAttribute]	String	"revisionId"	Name of the attribute in the RevisionChange model that corresponds to the ID of the Revision model. Attribute name can be modified to "revision_id" by passing [underscoredAttributes] option.
[revisionModel]	String	"Revision"	Name of the model that keeps the revision models.
[tableName]	String	undefined	Name of the table that keeps the revision models. Passed to Sequelize.
[changeTableName]	String	undefined	Name of the table that keeps the revision change models. Passed to Sequelize. Table is camelCase or PascalCase.
[revisionChangeModel]	String	"RevisionChange"	Name of the model that tracks all the attributes that have changed during each create and update call.
[enableRevisionChangeModel]	Boolean	false	Disable the revision change model to save space.
[primaryKeyType]	Boolean	"serial"	The data type of primary keys used in the database. Available values are "serial", "uuid" or "ulid".
[underscored]	Boolean	false	The [revisionModel] and [revisionChangeModel] have "createdAt" and "updatedAt" columns, by default, setting this option to true changes it to "created_at" and "updated_at". Pass true to [underscoredAttributes] option as well for using underscored attributes to access those columns.
[underscoredAttributes]	Boolean	false	The [revisionModel] has "documentId", "documentIds" and the [revisionChangeModel] has a [defaultAttributes.revisionId] "revisionId, by default, setting this option to true changes it to "document_id", "document_ids" and "revision_id".
[userModel]	String	undefined	Name of the model that stores users in your application.
[userIdAttribute]	String	"userId"	Name of the attribute in the RevisionChange model that corresponds to the ID of the User model. Attribute name can be modified to "user_id" by passing [underscoredAttributes] option.
[enableCompression]	Boolean	false	Compresses the revision attribute in the [revisionModel] to only the diff instead of all model attributes.
[enableMigration]	Boolean	false	Automatically adds the [revisionAttribute] via a migration to the models that have paper trails enabled.
[enableStrictDiff]	Boolean	true	Reports integers and strings as different, e.g. 3.14 !== "3.14"
[asyncLocalStorage]	AsyncLocalStorage	undefined	The AsyncLocalStorage that contains the user id.
[belongsToUserOptions]	Object	undefined	The options used for belongsTo between userModel and Revision model
[metaDataFields]	Object	undefined	The keys that will be provided in the meta data object. { key: isRequired (boolean)} format. Can be used to privovide additional fields - other associations, dates, etc to the Revision model
[metaDataAsyncLocalStorage]	AsyncLocalStorage	undefined	The AsyncLocalStorage that contains the meta data object, from where the metaDataFields are extracted.
[useJsonDataType]	Boolean	true	Microsoft SQL Server and old versions of MySQL do not support JSON data type. Setting this option to false changes the data type to TEXT("medium").

Sequelize Models

Revision

Attribute	Data Type	Description
"id"	INTEGER | UUID	Primary key of the model. Data type is INTEGER by default, but can be modified to UUID for PostgreSQL by passing "uuid" to [primaryKeyType] option.
"model"	STRING	Name of the tracked model.
"document"	JSON | TEXT("medium")	Attributes of the model after the operation. The entire attributes are saved by default, but can be compresses only to the diff by passing [enableCompression] option.
"documentId"	INTEGER | UUID	ID of the tracked document. The first ID is used for a composite key. Attribute name can be modified to "document_id" by passing [underscoredAttributes] option.
"documentIds"	JSON | TEXT("medium")	Composite IDs of the tracked document. Attribute name can be modified to "document_ids" by passing [underscoredAttributes] option.
"operation"	STRING	Name of the operation such as "create", "update" and "destroy".
[revisionAttribute]	INTEGER	Version of the document starting from 1. The value is incremented every time when the document is created, updated or deleted. Attribute name is configured by [revisionAttribute], default to "revision". The same value is saved to [revisionAttribute] attribute of the tracked document as well.
[userIdAttribute]	(ID data type of of the user model)	Foreign key of the user model. Attribute name is configured by [userIdAttribute], default to "userId" and modified to "user_id" by passing [underscoredAttributes] option.

RevisionChnage

Attribute	Data Type	Description
"id"	INTEGER | UUID	Primary key of the model. Data type is INTEGER by default, but can be modified to UUID for PostgreSQL by passing "uuid" to [primaryKeyType] option.
"path"	TEXT	Modified attribute name.
"document"	JSON | TEXT("medium")	Modified attributes.
"diff"	JSON | TEXT("medium")	Difference of updated attribute, comparing character by character.
[revisionIdAttribute]	(ID data type of of the Revision model)	Foreign key of the Revision model. Attribute name is configured by [revisionIdAttribute], default to "revisionId" and modified to "revision_id" by passing [underscoredAttributes] option.

Migration Guide to 8.x.x

In version 8.x.x, sequelize-revision has moved away from using cls-hooked (which relies on the deprecated async_hook API) to using the more stable AsyncLocalStorage API. This change ensures better performance and stability for tracking asynchronous context in Node.js applications.

For more details, refer to the updated TIPS section in the README.

User Tracking

Before:

import { createNamespace } from "cls-hooked";

const session = createNamespace("my session");
session.set("userId", user.id);

await Model.update({
  /* ... */
});

After:

import { AsyncLocalStorage } from "async_hooks";

const asyncLocalStorage = new AsyncLocalStorage();

await asyncLocalStorage.run(user.id, async () => {
  await Model.update({
    /* ... */
  });
});

Saving Metadata

Before:

import { createNamespace } from "cls-hooked";

const session = createNamespace("my session");
session.set("metaData", { userRole: "admin" });

await Model.update({
  /* ... */
});

New Code (8.x.x):

import { AsyncLocalStorage } from "async_hooks";

const metaDataAsyncLocalStorage = new AsyncLocalStorage();

await metaDataAsyncLocalStorage.run({ userRole: "admin" }, async () => {
  await Model.update({
    /* ... */
  });
});