I’m struggling through some client work right now and finding that I have found at least 3 ways of how not to get the results I’m trying to achieve.

In this case it has to do with reporting to the user everything that has changed from the beginning of opening an order to the finalization of that order, updating the list of changes with every change on the form.

My initial trial was to try to capture changes as they happen using the BeforeUpdate event in the form, but before I even did this, I had already realized there are a number of possible changes that can trigger mass changes to other line items on the form.

I thought maybe I could just document these changes as notes to the rest of the audit log, but the problem is that the user really wanted to make sure that if the user undid all their changes, that the system would show that they made no change.  If the user undid some of these changes, then the messages would no longer be valid, so I finally gave up on this.

Anyway, I am two more attempted solutions beyond that and I am making progress.  But what is a valid solution anyway?

1. I want the solution to be fast.  The users should not be waiting around, or if they are they should be updated on the progress.
2. I want the solution to be easy to code and maintain.  Adding a bunch of messages like I was doing became evident quickly that this would be a difficult to maintain system.
3. The solution should fully solve the customer’s requirement.  If there’s no path to that, you really need to find another solution.