Audit & Activity Logging

The system keeps two complementary records of what happens: a system-wide activity log and an attendance-specific audit trail.

Activity log (ActivityLog)

Every meaningful mutation calls logActivity(type, description, metadata?) from src/lib/audit.ts. Each entry stores the activity type, a human-readable description, the acting userId, optional JSON metadata, and a timestamp. The admin Audit page and the dashboard's recent-activity feed read from this table.

logActivity() resolves the current session internally, and it is intentionally fail-safe — if writing the log fails, the error is swallowed so the main operation still succeeds.

Activity types

The ActivityType union (src/lib/audit.ts) enumerates every logged event:

Category	Types
Attendance	ATTENDANCE_EDIT, ATTENDANCE_SCAN, ATTENDANCE_ADMIN_EDIT, ATTENDANCE_DELETE
Staff	STAFF_ADD, STAFF_REMOVE
Students	STUDENT_ADD, STUDENT_REMOVE, STUDENT_UPDATE, STUDENT_PASSWORD_RESET, STUDENT_QR_REGEN
Sections	SECTION_ADD, SECTION_REMOVE, SECTION_UPDATE
Subjects	SUBJECT_ADD, SUBJECT_REMOVE, SUBJECT_UPDATE
System	SETTING_UPDATE, APPEAL_REVIEW, MASTERLIST_IMPORT, DATA_RESET

Attendance audit trail (AttendanceAudit)

Every create or update of an attendance record also writes an immutableAttendanceAudit row inside the same database transaction. This guarantees an attendance value never changes without a corresponding audit entry.

Each audit row captures:

• attendanceId — the record affected
• changedBy — the user id who made the change
• oldStatus → newStatus — the transition (old is null on first creation)
• timestamp
• reason — e.g. "QR Scan" for scan-driven changes

Why two logs?

• ActivityLog answers "what happened in the system, by whom?" across all features (imports, staff changes, settings, appeals, etc.).
• AttendanceAudit answers "how did this specific attendance record reach its current value?" — a focused, tamper-evident history for the most sensitive data in the system.

Together they make the platform fully auditable, which is central to the "secure" goal described in Objectives.