WSO2 Governance Registry 4.5.0 - Lifecycles

At the time of this post, we are preparing for the release of WSO2 Governance Registry 4.5.0. This new version has lots of new features and performance improvements. From this post, I would like to mention one such improvement that we did for G-Reg Lifecycle management feature.

Lifecycles in a nutshell

WSO2 G-Reg has a powerful lifecycle model with lots of flexibility. In WSO2 G-Reg, users have the ability to define their own lifecycle model using a simple XML configuration. The default lifecycle configuration of G-Reg has the ability to define states,check items,permissions,transition UIs, pre and post transition actions. A detailed description about the lifecycle model of WSO2 G-Reg can be found in this post.


In G-Reg 4.5.0 we have introduced the ability to audit lifecycle operations. This means we capture all the lifecycle operations of a particular resource. Following are some key points when it comes to lifecycle auditing.

Lifecycle auditing is turned on by default.

Auditing can be turned off from the lifecycle configuration. This can be done by setting audit=false in the lifecycle element in the lifecycle configuration.

Lifecycle auditing happens per lifecycle. Based on the configuration, all the resources associated with that lifecycle are audited.

Audit logs are kept as a resource in G-Reg. These resources are stored under, "/_system/governance/repository/components/org.wso2.carbon.governance/lifecycles/history" collection. A resource is created for every resource/collection that is associated with a lifecycle. The name of this resource is calculated by replacing all the "/" with "_" of its full path.

Audit logs are kept as a XML file. A sample audit log is as follows.