Descriptions/codes for numbers in the web_logs.web_application_action column?

[KristineRoshau]

Hello -

I am trying to decipher the web_application_action column in the web_logs table. Per the schema, the integers returns should be referring to "The action in the Canvas web application used to service this request." 

I can not find any reference for what these numbers actually mean, either in the DAP documentation or the schema details, and in the Entity Relationship diagram all it connects to is "canvas_logs.Action" which doesn't tell me anything either.

Does anyone know where I can find this information?

[IanGoh]

Yeah, I don't even see Action as a table I can get from the canvas_logs namespace.

[mclark19]

Hi @KristineRoshau -- Are you saying that the data in your "web_application_action" column in the "web_logs" table are integers and not strings? Could that be a data processing error? Our data for that field are all strings ("get_custom_colors", "unread_count", "grade_summary",  "image_thumbnail",  api_show", etc.). There are 420 distinct values of those strings for that column in our data, not any numbers.

Best,

Martyn 

[KristineRoshau · Accepted solution]

Hi @mclark19,

Thank you! This set me in the right direction. I double checked the datatype in my DB and it was indeed set to INT; however, what I hadn't looked at before were the two other tables that were generated when I initialized the database: web_logs__web_application_controller and web_logs__web_application_action. It appears the codes mapping numbers (id, integer) to the text strings (value, character varying(64)) are in there. 

I'm new to this so perhaps this is expected behavior, but when I initially changed the data type for those columns to text and tried to resync, it failed when attempting to recreate those two columns in the export. I ended up having to strip the collation then reconvert the columns back to data type INT before I could resync at all, but at least now I can reference the values in those other two tables.

Kristine

[sgergely]

Hi!

The reason for this, if you are using DAP CLI, to sync web logs data is because of the ENUM data type. It is not supported in SQL databases, that DAP CLI supports, the way we are using it in DAP. For example you would need to alter the whole table if you wanted to add to the list of ENUMS in PostgreSQL. So we are moving these ENUMs out to supporting tables when DAP CLI initiates the database tables.