This gem is an extension to paper_trail gem https://github.com/airblade/paper_trail. That means you need to pre install paper_trail gem. This gem will add one more method actor to instances of PaperTrail::Version that will return you the ActiveRecord object who was responsible for change.

This Gem only support >= rails 4.1.0 and above versions.

1. Add PaperTrailGlobalid to your Gemfile.

gem 'paper_trail-globalid'

1. And then execute:

bundle install

Basically this gem works on stroring global_id to whodunnit field of PaperTrail::Version table. As this is an additional extension installed, this will not hinder / break existing paper_trail functionalities.

widget = Widget.find 42
widget.versions               # [<PaperTrail::Version>, <PaperTrail::Version>, ...]
v = widget.versions.last

Now you can also store object to PaperTrail.whodunnit=, and if object will be instance of ActiveRecord::Base it will store the global id in the version's whodunnit column.

And you can also retrieve the actually object later just by using method actor.

admin = Admin.find(1)                       # <Admin:0x007fa2df9a5590>

PaperTrail.whodunnit = admin
PaperTrail.actor                            # <Admin:0x007fa2df9a5590> actual object

widget.update_attributes :name => 'Wibble'
widget.versions.last.whodunnit              # "gid://app/Admin/1"
widget.versions.last.actor                  # retruns the actuall object

Method actor will return the whodunnit value if we pass value another than ActiveRecord object.

PaperTrail.whodunnit = 'admin_name'
PaperTrail.actor                            # "admin_name"

widget.update_attributes :name => 'Wibble'
widget.versions.last.whodunnit              # "admin_name"
widget.versions.last.actor                  # "admin_name"

1. Fork it ( https://github.com/[my-github-username]/paper_trail-globalid/fork )
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create a new Pull Request