Laravel-activitylog: Error when saving properties to database

[BerendSpigt]

Describe the bug
The user data contained a 🙂 in one of the fields. When the model was saved, the following error occured:
Integrity constraint violation: 4025 CONSTRAINT properties failed for db_name.activity_log

So this is caused by the CHECK (json_valid(properties)) constraint. The smiley is not valid json, and probably should be encoded first.

I just removed the field from the logAttributes array as I don't really require the field to be logged. But maybe this helps improve this great package!

Versions (please complete the following information)

• PHP: 7.2
• Database: MariaDB
• Laravel: 7

[Gummibeer]

Without further debugging I would say that this is a bug in Laravel/Eloquent core as we don't serialize/encode the JSON ourselves but use the Eloquent cast logic to do so. 🤔
I will add a testcase and check if we can reproduce it. Possibly it's also a problem with MariaDB or something similar.

[BerendSpigt]

Thanks!

I don't know how Laravel handles this internally, but according to PHP docs this should be used:
json_encode( $text, JSON_UNESCAPED_UNICODE );

I never used this myself, just from the docs. Maybe this helps.

[Gummibeer]

Hey, after trying it my own and searching a bit it seems like your MariaDB setup isn't emoji compatible. 🤔
Modern databases can handle emojis with and without escaping as long as the used character set allows it.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/55437104/minimal-setup-for-mariadb-to-handle-emojis

Could you check this? As there's really nothing we could do in the package. And the Laravel core itself is also emoji compatible as long as the database is.

[BerendSpigt]

TLDR: you were right, it was a db issue. It only manifests in older version of MariaDB.

I did a full investigation of the problem:

1. The smiley is stored in the actual table of the model. So it's not about db support.
2. The issue was with MariaDB 10.2.15. I now also tested with MariaDB 10.3.2 and MariaDB 10.5.8. Both did not have this issue (I used a full DB dump).
3. On MariaDB 10.2.15, I removed the constraint "CHECK (json_valid(properties))" and after that had no issues. The resulting record was exactly the same as in the other MariaDB versions.

Conclusion:
This probably was a bug in an older version of MariaDB in the json_valid function.

Just for reference, the statement not working in the old version of MariaDB was:
INSERT INTO activity_log (log_name, description, subject_type, subject_id, causer_type, causer_id, properties, created_at, updated_at) VALUES ('default', 'updated', 'test\Models\User', 99229, 'test\Models\User', 1, '{\"attributes\":{\"memo\":\"Have fun play fast \ud83d\ude42\"},\"old\":{\"memo\":\"old\"}}', '2021-01-10 17:26:59', '2021-01-10 17:26:59');

Result:
4025 - CONSTRAINT properties failed for xxxx.activity_log, Time: 0.031000s

Thanks for your time and effort!