topic How to find changes done to a particular campaign by a user in CI Studio 6.5 in SAS Customer Intelligence

How to find changes done to a particular campaign by a user in CI Studio 6.5

vgp2 — Fri, 13 Apr 2018 18:33:54 GMT

For a campaign I am able to view the "modified by" and "date modified" in the UI as attached in screen shot but can you please suggest if there is a log I can find where I can know who are the users that made changes in the past for a particular campaign and what are the changes that they did.

Re: How to find changes done to a particular campaign by a user in CI Studio 6.5

pcapazzi — Fri, 13 Apr 2018 19:22:36 GMT

The closest I can come to this is:

You could turn on auto-generation of documents for a campaign diagram which would show you changes between executions at a high level (diagram, actual SQL executed). It would not provide you a list of changes and who made them.

The only other way is go through the MA Core Logs. Taking the date, time and user of the last modification you could find the last session and filter (grep in Linux) for rows matching that session ID (session ID being the 2nd item in []'s in the log after [CIExec-###]). It would probably be WAY more detailed that you could possibly want but that may be close to what you are looking for. That would tell what happened during the last "Save" though... perhaps it was a change that occurred before that. That's a deeper challenge.

Re: How to find changes done to a particular campaign by a user in CI Studio 6.5

Dmitry_Alergant — Fri, 13 Apr 2018 23:01:29 GMT

A while ago, our team had implemented a very sophisticated solution to solve this problem for one of our biggest SAS MA customers...

The solution was comprised of the following components:

A cron job that monitored CI Core log looking for "campaign saved" events when a user saved a campaign, every 15 minutes
For every identified campaign save event, running sasmaextract utility to extract a full campaign definition into an XML file
Committing that campaign XML as a file into an SVN repository under the name of the user who made the original save of a campaign, with a timestamp of the original campaign save event. A folder structure in SVN repository was reflecting the folder structure in SAS MA metadata.
A customized version of a WebSVN UI to provide users a lightweight browser-based view on that versioned campaign repository. So one could see a complete change history for every campaign (who made changes and when).

P.S> These days we'd probably utilized GIT / Github, back then SVN was still somewhat relevant.
A customized version of a "diff" page of WebSVN that allowed one to compare two revisions of the same campaign (or two campaigns one with another) in details - what exactly has changed. The page invoked a complex SAS script that parsed both campaigns XML (a portion that described a diagram), compared them node-by-node, and presented a diff result as a summary table: added nodes, deleted nodes, changed node properties, changed connections. This was the most complicated piece.
A "restore" button in WebSVN that allowed restoring a selected campaign version back into SAS MA repository using "sasmaimport" utility

Frankly speaking, this was quite a complex solution, required a lot of efforts to develop and to fix bugs... I would not recommend anyone developing the same thing from scratch, unless under a truly compelling need. But it worked. Back then it was developed for v5.41, not sure if it was even updated to 6.5.

Re: How to find changes done to a particular campaign by a user in CI Studio 6.5

vgp2 — Sat, 14 Apr 2018 03:39:15 GMT

Thanks a lot for the details it is very informative. We would not require all the components was hoping to get a list of users for made changes to a campaign from a log. Can you please suggest how to proceed further on this.