In order to make the partial diff as user-friendly as possible, a minimalist changelog was implemented in the database model. As the name suggests, it registers any create, update or delete operation performed over any object in the model. Internally, in the XML definition, the changelog contains a set of entries, each one composed of the date of the action (in local date/time), the object's signature, the type of the object, and the action taken.

In order to have some control over the model's changelog a simple widget was created and can be used to tweak the behavior of the changelog and to check some useful information like the last change made over the model and how many entries the changelog has. The partial diff operation and the changelog widget are fully described in, respectively, Chapter 5: Export, import and diff and Chapter 6: Advanced tools.