RE: how to find who read (was RE: Journaling)

If you use triggers, a program in essence is launched every time your 
selected data base files are updated.  It does not matter if the user is 
doing so via your regular ERP software, or some utility like DFU, a dangerous 
language like interactive SQL, or clicking on your AS/400 file through a PC 
utility like Windows Explorer.  The trigger captures an image of all records 
being altered before the proposed changes & after the proposed changes & the 
trigger program has access to both & to the information in the job that is 
doing this.

Your trigger program could permit the action to take place, but compare field 
for field before/after to determine what got changed & produce report or 
audit trail showing:

Which customers got changed, both key & whosis, what fields got changed - 
before / after, user-id doing it when, program or utility tool they did it 
with, work station address they did it from.  If you put this in an audit 
trail file, you can then sort to find out who was the last person to change a 
particular field.

To implement this, you need to study up the relevant manuals on UDB on what 
you need to do to have the file be monitored by a trigger program, and write 
the trigger program to capture whatever audit trail you desire.

Unfortunately, the business need is often such that we are not always 
interested in tracking everything that is done to some file.  The reality 
might be:

This customer order price is missing.  
We would like to know if it was NEVER entered, or if someone blanked it out.

We want to impose some tentative business rules on some files, but not make 
them official.  Instead, we want to get informational error messages when 
programs cause data to violate our rules, so that we can then debug those 
programs.

This item's cost master has a negative 0.00002 in the previous level.  
That field should never be negative.
We would like to see a report on all programs that have touched this record 
so as to identify which action made it violate our business rules.

There is a cost that can best be described as absurd.  We find it, we zero it 
out, let the system do its thing & everything seems Ok for a while, then an 
item cost goes absurd (think of filling the field with all 9's then 
subtracting 0.00002).  We do not know what is causing this.  Our ERP is 
incredibly complex with hundreds of programs touching the file & scores of 
users of it every day.

The total in this General Ledger Account does not seem to us to be correct, 
but everything adds up right.  We want to run a trace on all the data that 
contributed to this balance in the past 2 months to assure ourselves that 
there is no embezzlement going on here & that the programs involved are doing 
the math right.

There is a bogus vendor payable in the system for something we never 
purchased.  We would like to know if this was entered by the folks whose job 
it is to normally enter payables, or if some other person entered it.

We have done modifications in the past to assign a field to contain the name 
of the last person to update some record.  This helped immensely in the cases 
of too many cooks ... several people working from different documents to try 
to update some customer requirement, where in fact the customer had messed up 
& provided us with contradictory documents, but the 2 users were outraged 
that someone was messing up their input, until the interactive screen 
adjusted to identify the last person who updated this record (normally it 
should be YOU) highlighted with the name is other than current user.

Management has since reduced this kind of risk by designating which humans 
are in charge of all updating for which accounts.

We have histories of various kinds, in which audit trail information goes 
into a file which users can access via a variety of means.  We have modified 
data flowing into those histories to be sure of capturing user involved in 
making the transactions, and we have added to the conditions that put stuff 
into histories.

Someone supplied the union with a list of data that has put our labor 
management negotiators in a very difficult position.  We would like to see a 
list of everyone whose security permits them to print out that kind of data.

Mark's situation may be different than ours.  But these are some examples of 
why we might want more tools in our box of diagnostic alternatives, and some 
of the ways we try to deal with these issues.

Al Macintyre  ©¿©
MIS Manager Green Screen Programmer & Computer Janitor of BPCS 405 CD Rel-02 
running on AS/400 V4R3 http://www.cen-elec.com Central Industries of 
Indiana--->Quality manufacturer of wire harnesses and electrical 
sub-assemblies

From:   Oliver.Cherryman@mynd-uk.com (Cherryman, Oliver)

Please explain why do you need to know what was read in the first instance ?

What's the business practice ?

Are your files already journalled ?  If so do your applications use
commitment control ?

Have you considered reading the file in update mode and doing a (dummy)
update immediately afterwards to create a journal entry, or trigger a
trigger program ?

Regards

Oliver

From:   markallen@kellyskids.com (Mark Allen)

Thanks but I need to know what record was read (i.e. Customer Master
Key=1234567, etc.)

Mark Allen
IS Manager
Kelly's Kids
markallen@kellyskids.com

-----Original Message-----
On Behalf Of Rob Dixon

Mark

If you journal with OMTJRNE(*NONE) , then your joiurnal will record will
record any opens and closes of journalled files.  However, it does not tell 
you
which records in a file were read only those which were changed.

> Since this has come up here and I have been trying to find a "simple" way
> (i.e. like journaling, no program changes) to find out who has "read" a file
> and since Simon brought it up in his reply, does anyone have an idea of how
> to in essence "journal" read op's???

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