How to create user activity logs? - php

Question

My goal is to keep track of activity logs when any users update their username or email.
I have users table in my database lay out like this :
id
username
email
I decided to created a logs table that will contain :
username
username_new
email
email_new
created_at
user_id
After doing a bunch of researchs, some people suggested me to use Event::fire and Event::listen.
So … I been looking at this again and again for awhile now.
I got this.
For each action that a user takes should fire an event.
$event = Event::fire(‘user.log’, array($user));
Event::listen(‘user.log’, function($user)
{
$log->username = $user->username;
$log->username_new = Input::get(‘username’);
$log->email = $user->email;
$log->email_new = Input::get(‘email’);
$log->created_at = Input::get('created_at');
$log->user_id = $user->id;
$log->save();
});
I know that I put these code in
app/start/global.php OR app/events.php.
Well, I'm NEW to Laravel. But I believed that, "Every artist was once an amateur" - right ?
I'm not sure if my approach will work. BUT I hope that someone can point out if I did anything completely wrong, or possibly forgot anything.
Is what I am doing is logically make sense ?
HUGE thanks to everyone that contribute on this question !

Answer 1

Not a real answer to your question (which you seem to have answered yourself), but: you might want to consider a more generic solution. For example, lets say you have an object User like this
User {
protected $email;
protected $username;
protected $name;
}
When the user triggers a save, you trigger an event user.change($oldUser, $newUser) which, as param names suggest, propagate the user state before and after the change. You handle it with something like:
Event::listen('user.change', function($oldUser, $newUser) {
// you could do a recursive diff here
$diff = array_diff((array) $newUser, (array) $oldUser);
// diff here contains only the changes made in that request
// if you add more properties to user, they will work too
// as there might be one or more properties in the diff, a non-prescribed columns
// storage such as MongoDB might be a best choice
}
Food for thought in any way, HTH.