Ability to display foreign ids as a field from the related table

[ShaunWilders]

Foreign IDs are display as an ID. Ideally we'd be able to specify how these fields are displayed using data from the related table:

[iprastha]

Hi, i was having the same issue with you, especially displaying BelongsTo relationship. After reading in spatie/activitty-log package, there is a way to solve this using dot notation, for example

->logOnly(['interpreter.name']

Read more about that in this Link
However, using the dot notation causes issue with this package, because this package uses the get_data helper where it will break array structure using the dot notation as well.
Therefore currently I am implementing a custom pipe in spatie activity log using LoggablePipe (read more about it here) to replace all dot notation in the changes with underscore instead. This is what I did:

1. In your laravel project , under App\Services , create the file ReplaceDotFromLogChangesPipe.php

<?php
namespace App\Services;

use Closure;
use Illuminate\Support\Arr;
use Spatie\Activitylog\EventLogBag;
use Spatie\Activitylog\Contracts\LoggablePipe;

class ReplaceDotFromLogChangesPipe implements LoggablePipe
{

    public function handle(EventLogBag $event, Closure $next): EventLogBag
    {
        $event->changes['attributes'] = Arr::mapWithKeys($event->changes['attributes'], function (string $value, string $key){
            return [str_replace('.','_',$key)=>$value];
        });
        $event->changes['old'] = Arr::mapWithKeys($event->changes['old'], function (string $value, string $key){
            return [str_replace('.','_',$key)=>$value];
        });

        return $next($event);
    }
}

2. In your laravel project , under App\Providers\AppServiceProvider.php , add the following:

use App\Services\ReplaceDotFromLogChangesPipe;
...
public function boot(): void
    {
Order::addLogChange(new ReplaceDotFromLogChangesPipe()); // assuming "Order" is your model here, 
}

3. In your model under getActivitylogOptions(), use the dot notation as mentioned in spatie documentation

public function getActivitylogOptions(): LogOptions
    {
        return LogOptions::defaults()
            ->logOnly(['customer.name']); // using the dot notation same as in the relattionship defined in this model
    }

Now you can log any relationship using dot notation without breaking this package. I hope later on the owner of this package can see this solution and comeup with a more permanent solution built into the next version
Because using the dot notation is a standard method in the spatie package which this package relies on
Tagging @pxlrbt

Thank You

[ShaunWilders]

Works well, thank you. The only place where it doesn't work is on belongsToMany methods but looks like this package doesn't store changes to these at all anyway so I will need to have a think about how to log those kind of changes.