How To Setup Spring Data JPA Auditing

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Description: Auditing is useful for maintaining history records. This can later help us in tracking user activities.

Key points:

• create an abstract base entity (e.g., BaseEntity) and annotate it with @MappedSuperclass and @EntityListeners({AuditingEntityListener.class})
• in this base entity, add the following fields that will be automatically persisted:
        - @CreatedDate protected LocalDateTime created;
        - @LastModifiedDate protected LocalDateTime lastModified;
        - @CreatedBy protected U createdBy;
        - @LastModifiedBy protected U lastModifiedBy;
• enable auditing via @EnableJpaAuditing(auditorAwareRef = "auditorAware")
• provide an implementation for AuditorAware (this is needed for persisting the user that performed the modification; use Spring Security to return the currently logged-in user)
• expose this implementation via @Bean
• entites that should be audited should extend the base entity
• store the date-time in database in UTC