The audit event is recorded in the audit data table as an integer ID to save storage space and also to facilitate logical grouping of events by ID. Reports should join to the _aud-event table to display a more meaningful description of the event. The _event-description field should be structured in a meaningful way to appear on reports and would be the preferred field to use in the report. Note that for internal OpenEdge-defined events (with event IDs lower than 32000), the event description cannot be updated.

When defining audit events, you should ideally group the event IDs into ranges so that a range of events can be queried to group related information. This grouping approach has been followed as closely as possible for internal OpenEdge-defined audit events and would be a best practice for application events also.

Additionally, for internal audit events, the event name is structured to facilitate logical grouping so that related events can be queried using partial event name searches. Where such a query is required, the query has to start with the _aud-event table to first resolve the list of event IDs of interest.